THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT  OF 
RALPH  W.  SMITH 


/f  J2L.O- 


Modern   English  Writers 


Modern  English  Writers : 

Being   a  Study  of  Imaginative    Literature 
1890-1914 

By    Harold  I  Williams 

Author  of  « Two  Centuries  of  the  English  Novel ' 


New  York:   Alfred  A.  Knopf,     mcmxix 


PREFACE 


THIS  book  was  completed  not  long  before  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1914,  a  date  which  will  probably  present  to  future 
generations  a  visible  dividing  line  in  almost  every  sphere 
of  human  activity.  No  man  can  be  unconscious  of  a 
change  within  himself  and  in  his  preconceptions  during 
the  past  four  years.  If  most  of  the  writers  named  in  the 
following  pages  are  still  alive,  few,  perhaps  those  only 
whose  work  is  an  artifice  rather  than  a  response  to  life, 
continue  contentedly  in  the  old  paths  ;  and  for  the 
majority  the  pursuit  of  art  and  literature,  as  a  primary 
objective,  is  temporarily  dispossessed.  The  scope  of  this 
survey  may,  therefore,  fairly  be  regarded  as  covering  a 
period  contained  by  natural  boundaries.  The  introductory 
chapter  assigns  reasons  for  accepting  the  year  1890  as 
marking  the  end  of  a  stage  in  literary  history  and  the 
appearance  of  new  ideals  :  the  beginning  of  the  great  war 
was  an  abrupt  break  in  all  the  affairs  of  men. 

In  only  one  or  two  cases  has  it  been  thought 
necessary,  at  the  time  of  publication,  to  carry  the  story 
beyond  the  early  months  of  1914,  save  in  the  matter  of  an 
added  date  or  footnote.  Exceptions  to  a  rule  will  be 
found  in  the  pages  which  treat  of  Rupert  Brooke  and 
James  Elroy  Flecker,  two  poets  whose  deaths  fell  in  the 
earlier  part  of  the  war.  In  the  case  of  the  former,  at  least, 
to  leave  unnamed  the  work  of  the  last  few  months  would 
be  to  omit  nearly  all  that  mattered.  It  has  not,  on  the 
other  hand,  been  possible  to  observe  rigidly  a  line  (as 
imaginary  as  the  equator  and  as  useful)  drawn  through 
the  year  1890  ;  and  no  more  than  a  loose  adherence,  in 
the  spirit  rather  than  in  the  letter,  has  been  attempted. 

The  author  is  not  unconscious  of  the  temerity  of 
criticising  in  summary  writers  still  living.  Contemporary 
estimates  need  not  be  falsified  by  time,  but  they  are 
subject  to  the  indistinctness  of  near  vision,  to  those 


vi  PREFACE 

confusions  and  aberrations  the  critic  could  easily  have 
avoided  had  he  been  removed  from  the  scene  instead  of 
playing  a  part  within  it.  Nevertheless  these  chapters 
may  not  be  without  interest  and  usefulness  as  a  record  of 
adventures  among  books,  and  possibly  something  more. 

Apart  from  faults  to  be  charged  to  the  writer  it  may  be 
that  slips  appear  which  would  have  been  corrected  in 
better  times.  During  the  greater  part  of  the  war  the 
author  has  been  serving,  he  has  enjoyed  fewer  advantages 
in  passing  the  proofs  than  he  could  have  wished,  and,  on 
this  score,  he  can  perhaps  make  some  claim  to  indulgence. 

To  the  publishers  thanks  are  especially  due  for  helpful- 
ness and  advice  at  each  stage  of  this  book's  production; 
acknowledgments  are  tendered  to  the  editors  of  the 
Fortnightly  Review  and  Atlantic  Monthly  for  kind  per- 
mission to  reproduce,  with  modification,  matter  relating 
to  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy  and  Sir  William  Watson;  and, 
further,  the  writer  is  gratefully  indebted,  for  information 
readily  given,  to  the  Rev.  W.  H.  Flecker  and  to  Miss 
Munro,  as  well  as  to  many  of  those  whose  work  is  discussed 
in  the  pages  which  follow. 


CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY 

PAuE 

NEW  INFLUENCE    AND  TENDENCIES       ...  xi 

PART  I 
POETRY 

CHAPTER 

I.     POETS  or  THE  TRANSITION  .  .  .  3-18 

Oscar  Wilde — Alfred  Austin — Robert  Bridges — 
Watt-3-Dunton — Andrew  Lang — Edmund  Gosse 
— Wilfrid  Scawen  Blunt — Alice  Meynell — Mar- 
garet Louisa  Woods. 

II.     NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  .  .  .          19-53 

§1.  Arthur  Symons — John  Davidson — W.  E.  Henley 
— Rudyard  Kipling. 

§2.  Sir  William  Watson — Ernest  Dowson — William 
Sharp — Francis  Thompson. 

III.  THE  PASSAGE  or  THE  CENTURIES  .  .       56-139 

§1.  Thomas  Hardy — A.  E.  Housman — Herbert 
Trench — Stephen  Phillips — Laurence  Binyon — 
Maurice  Hewlett — C.  M.  Doughty — W.  W.  Gibson 
— John  Masefield — Lascelles  Abercrombie. 

§2.  Laurence  Housman — Richard  Le  Gallienne — A.  C. 
Benson  —  H.  C.  Beeching  —  Norman  Gale  —  Sir 
Arthur  Quiller-Couch — Sir  Henry  Newbolt. 

§3.  H.  D.  Lowry — Alfred  Noyes — T.  Sturge  Moore — 
Hilaire  Belloc — G.  K.  Chesterton — Alfred  Williams 
— W.  H.  Davies — John  Drinkwater — Walter  de  la 
Mare — Rupert  Brooke— James  Elroy  Flecker. 

IV.  THE  POETESSES    .....      141-151 

Laurence  Hope — Michael  Field — Mary  Coleridge — 
Rosamund  Marriott  Watson — Lady  Margaret 
Sackville — Ethel  Clifford. 


viii  CONTENTS 


'   PART  II 
IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS 

CHAPTEK  PAGE 

I.     THE  CELTIC  REVIVAL        .  .  .      155-162 

II.     IRISH  POETS          ...  .      163-181 

W.  B.  Yeats — A.  E. — Douglas  Hyde — Lionel  Pigot 

Johnson — J.   M.    Synge — Padraic   Colum — James 

Stephens — '  John    Eglinton  ' — Charles    Weekes — 

J.  H.  Cousins — Thomas  Keohler — George  Sigerson 

-'  Seurnas  MacCathmhaoil ' — Seumas  O'Sullivan. 

III.  IRISH  POETESSES  .  ...     183-192 

Jane  Barlow — '  Moira  O'Neill  '—Eva  Gore-Booth — 
Alice  Milligan — Ella  Young — Nora  Hopper — 
Katharine  Tynan — Dora  Sigerson  Shorter. 

IV.  THE  IRISH  LITERARY  THEATRE    .  .  .     193-190 

V.     THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  .  .  .      197-220 

W.  B.  Yeats — A.  E. — Edward  Martyn — George 
Moore — Lady  Gregory — J.  M.  Synge— William 
Boyle — Padraic  Colum — Lennox  Robinson — T.  C. 
Murray — Rutherford  Mayne — St.  John  Ervine. 


PART  III 

LITERARY  AND  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  IN 
ENGLAND 

CHAPTER 

I.     BEFORE  IBSEN      .....     223-236 

T.  W.  Robertson — Oscar  Wilde — Sir  Arthur  Pinero 
— Henry  Arthur  Jones — Sydney  Grundy — Charles 
Haddon  Chambers — R.  C.  Carton — H.  V.  Esmond. 

11.     AFTER  IBSEN         .....     237-263 

Bernard  Shaw — Granville  Barker — St.  John  Han- 
kin  —  John  Galsworthy  —  Stanley  Houghton — 
Gilbert  Cannan — Githa  Sowerby — John  Mase- 
field. 

III.     THE  UNCERTAIN  NOTE  ....        265-270 

Sir  James  Barrie — Alfred  Sutro — Arnold  Bennett 
— Somerset  Maugham — Hubert  Henry  Davies — 
Rudolf  Besior — B.  M.  Hastings. 


CONTENTS  ix 


PART  IV 
THE  NOVEL 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     LATE  DEVELOPMENTS  273-279 


II.     NEW-COMERS          .  .      281-354 

§1.  Oscar  Wilde — George  Moore — George  Gissing — 
Rudyard  Kipling — Samuel  Butler. 

§2.  Watts-Dunton — 'Mark  Rutherford.' 

§3,  Hubert  Crackanthorpe — Henry  Harland — Ernest 
Dowson — H.  D.  Lowry — Arthur  Symons — John 
Davidson — Max  Beerbohm — Laurence  Housman 
— Bernard  Shaw. 

§4.  Cunninghame  Graham  —  W.  H.  Hudson  —  Sir 
Arthur  Quiller-Couch — Sir  Henry  Rider  Haggard 
—  Baring-Gould  —  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  —  Sir 
Gilbert  Parker — Henry  Seton  Merriman — Grant 
Allen — Israel  Zangwill — W.  E.  Tirebuck. 

§5.  David  Christie  Murray — Sir  Hall  Caine — Frank- 
fort Moore — E.  F.  Benson — Morley  Roberts — '  F. 
Anstey  ' — Jerome  K.  Jerome — W.  W.  Jacobs. 

SCOTCH  NOVELISTS 

§6.  Stevenson,  Macdonald,  Black — William  Sharp — 
Neil  Munro — Sir  James  Barrie — '  Ian  Maclaren  ' 
— S.  R.  Crockett — '  George  Douglas  ' — J.  H.  Find- 
later  and  Mary  Findlater. 


111.     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  .  .      355-416 

:H.  G.  Wells — Arnold  Bennett — John  Galsworthy — 
Eden  Phillpotts  —  '  John  Trevena  '  —  Gilbert 
Caiman — E.  M.  Forster — William  de  Morgan — The 
Cockney  Dialect  Novel :  Arthur  Morrison,  Somerset 
Maugham,  Barry  Pain,  Pett  Ridge — E.  Temple 
Thurston,  Hugh  Walpole,  Compton  Mackenzie, 
Oliver  Onions — Joseph  Conrad — F.  T.  Bullen — 
John  Masefield— Robert  Hichens — Maurice  Hew- 
lett— Sir  Henry  Newbolt — R.  H.  Benson — 'Anthony 
Hope'— W.  J.  Locke— Alfred  Ollivant— G.  S. 
Street — Hilaire  Belloc — G.  K.  Chesterton — '  Saki  ' 
— E.  V.  Lucas — Stephen  Gwynn- — 'G.  A.  Birming- 
ham ' — Canon  Sheehan — Jametj  Stephens. 


x  CONTENTS 

CHAPTEK  1'AGB 

WOMEN  NOVELISTS  ....     417-464 

Mrs.  Humphry  Ward — '  Olive  Schreiner  ' — '  Sarah 
Grand  ' — '  George  Egerton  ' — '  Iota  ' — Elizabeth 
Robins  —  May  Sinclair — M.  >P.  Willcocks  — 
Beatrice  Harraden  —  '  Lucas  £  Malet '  -  - '  John 
Oliver  Hobbes  ' — Mary  Coleridge — '  Elizabeth  ' 
— Ellen  Thorneycroft  Fowler — Lady  Ritchie — 
M.  L.  Woods — '  John  Strange  Winter  ' — W.  K. 
Clifford — Mrs.  Alfred  Sidgwick — Netta  Syrett — 
Una  L.  Silberrad— Ethel  Sidgwick — Jane  Barlow 
— Katharine  Tynan — Nora  Hopper — '  Somerville 
and  Ross  ' — '  Ouida  ' — M.  E.  Braddon — Marie 
Corelli. 

V.     A  NOTE  ON  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  .  .     455-480 

Henry  James— W.  D.  Howells — F.  Marion  Crawford 
— G.  W.  Cable — James  Lane  Allen — Harold 
Frederic — Mary  Eleanor  Wilkins— '  Charles  Egbert 
Craddock  ' — Thomas  Nelson  Page — Ellen  Glasgow 
— Owen  Wister — Frank  Norris — Upton  Sinclair 
— Winston  Churchill— Robert  Herrick — Ambrose 
Bierce  —  Jack  London — Mrs.  Atherton  —  Kate 
Douglas  Wiggin — Mrs.  Wharton. 


INTRODUCTORY 

NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES 

EVERY  year  begins  a  new  age,  and  each  week  we  are  in 
transition  between  distinct  and  important  periods  in  the 
life-story  of  men.  But  in  certain  years  or  decades  of  years 
the  rifts  in  the  narrative  are  wider,  and  the  eye  in  retro- 
spect cannot  avoid  resting  upon  them.  The  majority  of 
the  human  race  lives  upon  the  plains  ;  but  nations  are 
largely  divided  from  each  other  by  seas,  rivers  and 
mountain  ranges.  And,  in  like  manner,  literature  and 
art  tend  within  periods  that  can  be  defined  to  expand 
upon  the  same  plane.  There  will  be  inequalities  of  sur- 
face, broken  ground  and  smooth,  arid  tracts  and  fertile 
slopes  ;  yet  in  the  whole  we  recognise  a  land  tempered 
by  a  single  climate.  And  such  a  land,  lying  under  the 
influences  of  one  climate,  we  see  in  those  years  between 
the  death  of  Byronism  as  a  cult  and  the  beginning  of  the 
'nineties  in  the  last  century  ;  that  period  chiefly  marked 
out  in  poetry  by  the  work  of  Tennyson  and  Browning, 
in  fiction  by  the  novels  of  Dickens,  Thackeray,  the  Brontes, 
George  Eliot,  and,  in  some  degree,  George  Meredith  and 
Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  in  miscellaneous  prose  and  essay 
writing  by  Ruskin,  Matthew  Arnold  and  Pater.  But  just 
as  the  eighteenth  century  proper  was  broken  in  its  ninth 
decade  by  the  shock  of  the  French  Revolution,  so  the 
Victorian  age,  with  its  antimacassars,  glass  pendants, 
religious  polemics,  muscular  Christianity,  and  despairing 
belief  in  the  earnestness  and  reality  of  life,  loses  itself  in 
the  sands  ten  or  fifteen  years  before  the  close  of  the  century. 
The  rule  and  the  graded  scale  have  no  place  in  literary 
history ;  we  can  draw_j  no  hard-and-fast  line  between 
periods,  however  distinct ;  Rogers  and  Campbell  wrote 
long  after  the  Revolution,  Victorian  novels  and  poetry 
are  still  published,  perhaps  always  will  be  ;  nevertheless, 


xii  INTRODUCTORY 

the  century  of  Pope,  Voltaire  and  Johnson  was  passing 
away  in  1790,  and  the  Victorianism  of  the  Victorian  age 
died  about  1890. 

By  the  year  1890  nearly  everything  we  more  peculiarly 
associate  with  the  genius  and  achievement  of  Queen 
Victoria's  reign  was  passing  out  of  a  present  into  a  past, 
its  work  in  prose  and  poetry  was  being  diligently  edited 
with  notes  and  commentary  to  guide  a  later  generation. 
The  battle  of  science  and  theology,  which  vexed  the  first 
readers  of  In  Memoriam,  no  longer  disquieted,  and  even 
the  searchings  of  La  Saisiaz  (1878)  seemed  remote.  "  The 
Victorian  era  conies  to  an  end  and  the  day  of  sancta 
simplicitas  is  quite  ended,"  wrote  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  in 
1894.  It  was  despite,  or  perhaps  because  of  a  naive 
simplicity  that  the  reign  of  Victoria  was  signally  great  in 
the  annals  of  literature,  thought,  art,  mechanical  inven- 
tion and  commercial  expansion.  The  Oxford  Movement, 
the  Broad  Crr.irch  Movement,  the  sceptical  soul-earnest- 
ness of  Clough  and  Arnold,  the  Darwinian  theory,  the 
miscellanies  of  Spencerian  philosophy,  Positivism,  Pre- 
Raphaelitism  were  once  master-keys  to  influential  sects; 
by  1890  they  were  bent  and  only  turned  in  the  locks 
with  much  humouring.  They  were  all  in  turn  to  the 
popular  mind  single  remedies  for  complicated  ills,  and, 
when  the  cure  failed  to  be  as  complete  as  many  had 
promised,  a  reaction  set  in  against  these  simple  abstrac- 
tions. Either  in  weariness  or  that  distaste  of  the  adoles- 
cent for  the  scheme  of  things  in  which  they  have  been 
educated,  men  claimed  the  right  to  paint  or  to  write  of 
life  as  they  saw  it  without  speculation.  The  life  of  the 
present  is  with  us,  the  deductions  and  philosophies  uncer- 
tain, it  suffices  to  show  what  is,  without  embodying  per- 
sonal interpretations — this  realistic  attitude  was  adopted 
by  a  number  of  artists  and  writers  of  the  younger  genera- 
tion. But,  as  every  stream  has  eddies  which  set  back- 
ward beneath  the  bank,  every  change  in  the  tide  of  events 
swirls  uncertainly,  seeking  its  way  from  the  present  into 
the  future.  The  cross-currents  are  many  and  often  wear 
the  bank  as  quickly  as  the  central  stream  ;  and  this  is 
exactly  what  we  note  in  the  last  two  decades  of  the  nine- 
teenth century. 

The  year  1890  has  been  named  as  the  virtual  close  of 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES      xiii 

the  age  commonly  known  as  Victorian.  In  the  decades 
preceding  and  following  that  year  new  forces  and  new 
influences  take  the  place  of  those  which  had  ruled  since 
the  romantic  triumph  early  in  the  century  and  the  decay 
of  Byronism  a  little  later.  The  nature  of  these  new 
influences  cannot  be  stated  in  a  few  words,  but  they  may 
be  roughly  divided  under  four  heads,  which  may  best  be 
explained  by  (1)  an  attempt  to  interpret  the  general 
significance  of  Oscar  Wilde's  sestheticism,  (2)  the  aims 
of  the  group  of  writers  who  gathered  about  the  Yellow 
Book  and  Savoy,  (3)  the  influence  of  W.  E.  Henley,  and 
(4)  the  ideals  of  the  Celtic  Revival  in  Ireland.  Of  these 
four,  the  work  of  Oscar  Wilde  slightly  antedates  the 
period  with  which  this  volume  is  more  immediately  con- 
cerned. On  the  other  hand,  it  is  to  be  remembered  that 
the  closing  years  of  the  last  and  the  early  years  of  this 
century  are  still  too  near  to  be  seen  in  clear  perspective. 
Nevertheless,  certain  broad  tendencies  manifest  them- 
selves ;  and,  if  it  be  remembered  that  no  hard  and  fast 
demarcations  are  safe,  it  will  be  found  that  the  majority 
of  writers  belonging  to  the  period  of  this  book  incline  to 
follow  one  or  another  of  the  chief  directions  of  influence 
noted. 

And,  yet  again,  the  Victorian  age,  which  was  passing  in 
1890,  was  not  of  one  texture,  nor  did  it  disappear  suddenly. 
George  Meredith,  for  example,  was  typical  of  a  period  of 
transition.  He  was  a  Victorian,  but  not  wholly  of  his 
time,  for  none  of  the  great  movements  of  the  age,  scientific, 
theological  or  literary,  can  claim  his  discipleship.  He 
numbered  friends  in  the  extreme  left  of  the  scientific 
materialists,  but  he  was  as  little  of  them  as  he  was  a 
follower  of  the  churches ;  accepting  neither  an  easy 
optimism  nor  a  commonplace  pessimism,  he  steered  a 
middle  course  between  the  two  ;  and  his  strong  faith  in 
humanity  never  led  him  into  the  camp  of  the  Positivists. 
He  was  one  of  the  few  men  of  his  time — Butler  was  another 
— to  realise  that  life  and  art  are  too  complicated  to  be 
solved  by  the  formulae  of  sects,  that  our  chief  business 
is  with  the  present,  and  that  the  soul  lives  on  hopes,  not 
dogmatic  certainties.  He  never  abandoned  in  contempt 
the  hope  of  the  infinite  buried  in  the  finite,  but  the  problem 
did  not  weigh  upon  him  as  upon  so  many  Victorian  poets 


xiv  INTRODUCTORY 

and  prose-writers.  In  his  ability  to  see  things  clear  and 
whole  without  attempting  to  simplify,  in  his  power  to 
doubt  without  losing  faith,  in  his  contentment  to  use  the 
present  that  is  given  and  speculate  on  the  unprovable 
without  uneasiness,  Meredith  belonged  less  to  the  middle 
than  to  the  end  of  the  century  in  which  he  began  to  write. 
His  psychology  also,  like  his  thought,  is  elaborate  and 
complex,  unlike  the  simple,  sentimental  and  Arthurian 
moralities  which  surrounded  him  in  his  youth. 

It  was  not,  however,  till  1885,  with  the  publication  of 
Diana  of  the  Crossways,  that  Meredith  became  an  even 
moderately  popular  writer ;  and  about  this  time  can  be 
placed  the  popularisation  of  the  theory  of  "  art  for  art's 
sake."  The  appearance  of  this  doctrine,  that  art  goes 
first  with  life  padding  humbly  at  her  heels,  clearly  marks 
a  turning  from  the  broad  turnpike  of  Victorianism,  now 
grown  a  little  dusty  with  the  number  travelling  that  way. 
Even  the  most  extreme  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  poets  and 
painters  were  often  as  much  concerned  with  history  as 
with  art,  their  poems  and  pictures  were  founded  upon 
myth,  legend  and  story  long  traditionary  with  men. 
Their  art  was  not  intelligible  without  a  knowledge  of  the 
ideas  underlying  it ;  it  was  not  only  a  matter  of  line 
and  colour,  the  impressionistic  rendering  of  a  moment. 
Rossetti  painted  "  Dante's  Dream "  ;  Swinburne  wrote 
Atalanta  in  Calydon  (1865)  and  Ereciheus  (1876). 

If  not  the  popularly  recognised  apostle  of  the  new 
gospel  of  art  for  art's  sake,  James  M'Neill  Whistler  was 
the  most  consistent  follower  of  its  tenets.  His  work  owes 
nothing  to  the  human,  moral  and  sentimental  interest ; 
his  whole  aim  is  to  assimilate  and  select  from  the  visual 
and  transient  impressions  of  the  eye.  Tradition  and 
medievalism  are  nothing  to  him  :  he  paints  the  mists 
and  smoke-dimmed  sunsets  of  the  Thames  without  yield- 
ing to  the  pathetic  fallacy,  and  his  "  Portrait  of  Miss 
Alexander  "  is  a  "  Harmony  in  Gray  and  Green."  His 
practical  inability  completely  to  master  line  or  colour 
governed  the  direction  of  his  theory  and  practice,  and 
partly  explained  his  abandonment  of  colour  for  the  use  of 
tone.  His  primary  importance  to  the  story  of  English 
art,  however,  is  his  persistent  exclusion  from  painting  of 
history  or  literature. 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES        xv 

The  action  Whistler  brought  against  Ruskin  in  1878 
gave  his  theories  a  general  notoriety  ;  and  soon  after  this 
Oscar  Wilde's  aestheticism  was  sufficiently  well  known  to 
ordinary  theatre-goers  to  call  for  the  satire  of  Patience. 
And  Wilde  unwittingly  engineered  the  popularity  of  the 
operetta  in  the  United  States  by  lecturing  in  that  country 
in  1882  on  '  ^Esthetic  Philosophy.'  For  many  Americans 
he  was  the  specimen  aesthete  who  made  intelligible  the 
satire  of  the  English  musical  comedy.  Wilde  returned  to 
England  the  high  priest  of  aestheticism  ;  but  he  failed  to 
observe  the  consistency  of  Whistler  in  another  field  of 
art.  The  endeavour  of  either  was  to  insulate  art  from  the 
multifarious  activities  of  everyday  life,  to  sit  in  a  little 
corner  and  burn  incense  before  jealous  gods  unknown  to 
the  heathen  Philistine.  Wilde,  like  Whistler,  tried  to 
make  of  art  an  exclusive  cult  for  a  chosen  people.  He 
failed  because  he  had  a  larger  mind  and  wider  knowledge, 
because  his  theories  constantly  overran  the  measure  he 
attempted  to  impose  upon  them,  and  because  he  was  more 
human  than  Whistler — he  was,  as  Andre  Gide  has  called 
him,  "  un  grand  viveur."  Wilde  was  a  man  of  genius  ; 
nearly  everything  he  has  written  suggests  a  faculty  for 
something  greater,  for  his  work  as  a  whole  is  an  illustra- 
tion of  the  wreck  of  art  upon  theory.  He  is,  however,  of 
interest  and  importance  as  the  chief  figure  in  one  of  those 
movements  which  mark  the  close  of  the  period  which  we 
call  Victorian  for  want  of  a  better  term  of  definition. 

Wilde  completely  transfigured  the  early  influences 
under  which  he  fell  and  gave  them  again  to  the  world  in 
a  new  form.  The  strongest  impressions  he  received  during 
his  undergraduate  days  at  Oxford  came  to  him  from 
Ruskin,  Pater,  and  a  journey  in  1877  to  Italy  and  Greece. 
But  the  academic  and  thrice-refined  doctrine  of  Pater 
became  a  sensuous  sestheticism,  and  Ruskin's  assumption 
of  an  ethical  rule  for  the  judgment  of  art  is  reversed.  In 
Modern  Painters  Ruskin  had  written  in  explanation  of 
himself  as  a  critic  of  art :  "  In  my  works  on  architecture 
the  preference  accorded  finally  to  one  school  over  another 
is  founded  on  a  comparison  of  their  influences  on  the  life 
of  the  workman."  The  one-time  disciple,  Wilde,  declaredy 
"  They  are  the  elect  to  whom  beautiful  things  mean  onl : 
Beauty.  There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  moral  or  an  immoral 


xvi  INTRODUCTORY 

book.  Books  are  well  written,  or  badly  written.  That  is 
all."  Perverse  and  crochety  as  Ruskin's  judgments  often 
are,  the  moral  standard  is  always  the  final  court  of  appeal  : 
for  Wilde  art  was  a  cult  independent  of  life,  the  use  of  the 
ethical  rule  was  a  confusion  of  thought ;  art  was  neither 
moral  nor  immoral,  it  was  simply  non-moral. 

Wilde  has  supplied  clear  expositions  of  his  theory  of  the 
nature  of  art  in  the  preface  to  The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray 
and  in  his  essay  on  The  Decay  of  Lying.  If  we  accept  his 
postulate  that  such  a  thing  as  an  art  wholly  independent 
of  life  can  exist,  we  see  that  his  assertion  of  its  non-morality 
is  not  a  mere  flouting  of  popular  prejudice,  but  a  direct 
consequence  of  his  theory.  If  art  can  be  produced  with- 
out reference  to  nature,  whether  human  or  inanimate, 
we  can  scarcely  attribute  moral  responsibility  to  the  artist 
or  his  work.  And  this  was  Wilde's  position.  "  The  proper 
school  to  learn  art  in,"  he  writes  in  The  Decay  of  Lying,, 
"  is  not  Life  but  Art  "  :  and  again,  in  the  same  essay, 
"  All  bad  art  comes  from  returning  to  Life  and  Nature, 
and  elevating  them  into  ideals."  He  believed,  impossible 
as  it  is  to  conceive  the  position,  if  art  be  a  product  of 
human  activity,  that  "  Art  never  expresses  anything  but 
itself."  Far  from  regarding  art  as  a  mirror  of  life  he 
asserted,  "  Life  imitates  Art  far  more  than  Art  imitates 
Life  "  ;  and  he  added  as  a  corollary  :  "  External  Nature 
also  imitates  Art.  The  only  effects  that  she  can  show  us 
are  effects  that  we  have  already  seen  through  poetry,  or 
in  paintings."  The  handling  of  the  dialogue  in  this  essay 
bears  witness  to  the  innate  literary  skill  of  Wilde ;  but  his 
logic,  like  his  art,  is  impressionistic  and  irrelevant.  If 
Wilde  were  merely  trying  to  say,  as  by  some  he  has  been 
understood  to  say,  that  life  strives  to  express  itself  in  art 
and  therefore  follows  art,  his  essay  only  calls  for  the  remark 
that  he  has  succeeded  in  bedizening  with  useless  and  con- 
fusing epigrams  a  truth  often  simply  and  clearly  stated 
before  him.  This,  however,  is  not  his  meaning,  for  Wilde 
is  never  weary  of  asserting  the  independence  of  life  and 
art.  If  he  had  regarded  art  as  the  highest  expression 
toward  which  life  was  constantly  striving  he  could  not 
have  written,  "  All  art  is  quite  useless,"  perhaps  the  only 
remark  in  the  preface  to  Dorian  Gray  entirely  relevant  to 
the  matter  of  the  book. 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES     xvii 

Oscar  Wilde  and  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  are  in  the  succes- 
sion of  Ruskin  and  Pater,  but  they  stand  on  the  other 
side  of  a  rift,  and  mark  a  new  period.  Ruskin  had  declared 
that  there  were  laws  of  truth  and  right  in  art  as  fixed  as 
those  of  harmony  in  music  and  affinity  in  chemistry,  laws 
ascertainable  by  study,  labour  and  thought.  In  the  more 
systematic  part  of  Modern  Painters  he  makes  some  parade 
of  method  in  the  discovery  and  arrangement  of  these  canons 
of  art,  but  soon  desists  with  the  remark,  so  congenial  to 
his  habits  of  mind,  that  too  systematic  a  book  is  rather  a 
hindrance  than  a  help  to  the  reader.  Ruskin's  great 
talent  for  close  observation  and  analysis  of  detail  could 
never  make  him  the  master  of  a  complete  philosophy  of 
the  beautiful :  the  facts  which  remain  clear  are,  that  with 
him  art  was  a  criticism  of  life  and  nature,  its  functions 
moral,  and  that  his  ultimate  judgments  were  guided  by 
the  ethical  standard.  In  earlier  life  Pater,  his  disciple, 
departed  so  far  from  his  master  as  to  embrace  a  vague 
kind  of  aesthetic  hedonism,  nourishing  the  inner  flame  of 
life  on  emotions  aroused  by  beauty ;  but  in  later  years 
he  adopted  an  esoteric  Christianity  and  a  more  pronounced 
moral  attitude  toward  life  and  art.  In  the  work  of  Pater, 
as  a  critic  of  art,  there  is  nothing  sufficiently  decisive  or 
original  to  mark  a  point  of  fresh  departure.  He  is  not  ill 
at  ease  in  the  same  house  with  Ruskin  and  Tennyson. 
With  Oscar  Wilde  and  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  it  is  far  other- 
wise :  art  is  no  longer  an  integral  part  of  life,  decking  its 
halls  with  Morris  hangings,  but  a  way  of  escape  into  a 
haven  secluded  from  crude  reality. 

It  is  needless  to  expose  the  irrationality  of  a  theory 
which  conceives  of  an  art  independent  of  everyday  life. 
No  work  of  art  can  be  wholly  impersonal.  If  Wilde  asserts 
in  The  Decay  of  Lying  that,  "  Art  never  expresses  any- 
thing but  itself,"  it  is  not  with  full  knowledge  that  he  can 
support  his  thesis  ;  for  in  the  preface  to  Dorian  Gray  he 
offers  the  less  dogmatic  assertion  that,  "  To  reveal  art 
and  conceal  the  artist  is  art's  aim."  Nor  is  the  preface 
consistent  within  itself;  before  the  conclusion  he  writes, 
"  It  is  the  spectator,  and  not  life,  that  art  really  mirrors." 
Art  cannot  be  held  to  mirror  and  conceal  the  artist  or 
spectator  at  one  and  the  same  time.  The  conclusion  of 
the  whole  matter  must  be  that  art  reveals  the  artist  in 


xviii  INTRODUCTORY 

greater  or  lesser  degree,  and  mirrors  life  the  more  abun- 
dantly as  the  artist  is  in  touch  with  the  whole  experience 
of  life. 

The  impulses,  orthodox  or  sceptical,  of  art  and  poetry 
in  the  Victorian  age  were  largely  governed  by  a  belief 
that  conduct  was  all-important.  Wilde's  unavailing 
attempt  to  create  an  intellectual  theory  of  art,  of  a 
sensuous  aestheticism,  was  the  first  sign  of  a  reaction.  It 
was  followed  or  accompanied  by  other  formative  ten- 
dencies, which  are  still  working  themselves"  out  in  our 
midst.  The  central  decades  of  the  last  century  were 
almost  wholly  Teutonic  in  feeling  and  inspiration.  The 
work  of  Carlyle  in  introducing  German  literature  to 
English  readers  had  borne  abundant  fruit  where  it  was 
least  recognised,  and  Matthew  Arnold's  praise  of  the 
lucidity,  logical  acumen,  "  openness  of  mind  and  flexi- 
bility of  intelligence,"  of  the  French  people  fell  on  deaf 
ears.  The  group  of  young  writers  and  artists  who  gathered 
about  the  Yellow  Book  (1894-97)  and  the  Savoy  (Jan.  to 
Dec.,  1896)  represents  a  reasoned  and  intellectual  reaction 
in  the  direction  of  Celtic  and  French  ideals  ;  and  other 
attempts  at  producing  an  art  and  literature  of  a  new 
form  appeared  in  The  Dome  (1897,  1898)  and  The  Pageant 
(1896,  1897).  In  poetry  the  most  notable  contributors  to 
the  Yellow  Book  were  Mr.  Arthur  Symons,  John  Davidson, 
Ernest  Dowson,  Lionel  Johnson,  Laurence  Binyon,  Mr. 
W.  B.  Yeats  and  Mrs.  Marriott  Watson  ;  in  prose  fiction 
may  be  named  Henry  James,  Henry  Harland,  Hubert 
Crackanthorpe,  Mr.  Kenneth  Grahame,  '  George  Egerton,' 
and,  belonging  to  an  older  generation,  Mr.  George  Moore  ; 
among  artists  whose  drawings  appeared  in  the  magazine 
were  Aubrey  Beardsley,  Conder,  Mr.  Charles  Shannon, 
Mr.  Will  Rothenstein  and  Mr.  Laurence  Housman.  Writers 
so  diverse  from  each  other  in  aim  and  ideal  as  these  cannot 
be  placed  in  a  common  class  or  bound  by  a  single  defini- 
tion. The  hard  realism  of  Crackanthorpe  and  the  mysticism 
of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  or  Mr.  Laurence  Housman  have  neither 
part  nor  lot  with  each  other.  But  undoubtedly  the  clearest 
note  of  the  new  publication  was  a  conscious  effort  to 
avoid  the  moral  sentiments  and  romantic  idealisms  of  the 
Victorian  age,  and  to  paint  life  with  an  exact  and  unshrink- 
ing realism.  Crackanthorpe  was  the  disciple  of  Maupassant 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES      xix 

and  described  drab  and  seamy  corners  of  life  with  cold 
realism ;  '  George  Egerton '  wrote  in  the  same  spirit, 
touching  her  narrative,  however,  with  commentary  upon 
the  relationship  of  woman  to  man  in  the  social  economy  ; 
Mr.  Symons  and  Davidson  wrote  poems  of  the  ballet, 
the  music-hall  and  Fleet  Street. 

The  first  number  of  the  Yellow  Book  contained  a  fine 
essay  by  Mr.  Arthur  Waugh  on  '  Reticence  in  Literature,' 
which  might  easily,  on  account  of  its  importance,  be  taken 
for  a  manifesto  of  the  new  periodical.  The  habit  of  reti- 
cence, he  points  out,  is  not  a  national  characteristic,  for, 
as  a  people,  we  admire  openness  of  speech.  But  to  the 
value  of  outspoken  bluntness  there  is  a  limit.  Wise  men 
always  exercise  a  reserve.  The  representative  literature 
of  each  age  is  not  its  critical  and  philosophical,  but  its 
creative.  And  for  the  literature  of  each  age  is  set  a  point 
of  reticence — the  intelligence  and  taste  of  that  age. 
Beyond  this  the  point  of  reticence  is  marked  by  "  the 
permanent  standard  of  artistic  justification,  the  presence 
of  the  moral  idea."  The  essay  is,  in  brief,  an  assertion  of 
the  classic  ideal ;  and  we  are  often  reminded  of  Matthew 
Arnold.  But  few  of  the  opinions  expressed  in  this  essay 
find  illustration  in  the  magazine.  The  first  number 
opens  with  a  story  by  Henry  James,  it  contains  Mr. 
Max  Beerbohm's  witty  and  well-known  '  Defence  of 
Cosmetics,'  and  other  sketches,  stories  and  poems  bearing 
little  family  relationship  to  each  other.  The  truth  is  that 
Harland,  the  editor,  never  succeeded  in  giving  to  the 
magazine  any  recognisable  individuality.  The  first  three 
numbers  contained  clever  and  sometimes  strong  work  by 
young  men,  who  were  united  only  in  the  attempt  to  dis- 
cover for  themselves  a  personal  and  new  mode  of  ex- 
pression. The  Arthurian  romances  of  Tennyson  and  the 
medisevalism  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites  were  sinking  into  a 
meaningless  and  hoary  tradition,  and  against  this  con- 
vention the  group  which  gathered  about  the  Yellow  Book 
and  the  Savoy  rebelled,  striking  out  in  different  paths 
toward  severe  realism,  Gallic  wit  and  gaiety,  Celtic  or 
bookish  mysticism,  according  as  each  man  was  called  and 
found  himself  able.  But  their  aims  were  too  diverse  to 
admit  of  fusion,  and  the  more  important  contributors  to 
the  Yellow  Book  soon  fell  away. 


xx  INTRODUCTORY 

The  periodical  appeared  quarterly  and  struggled  on  to 
a  thirteenth  number ;  but  long  before  this  it  had  lost  any 
character  it  ever  possessed.  The  first  four  numbers  alone 
are  of  interest  and  significance.  By  the  summer  of  1895 
the  Yellow  Book,  in  the  words  of  Mr.  Symons,  "  ceased  to 
mark  a  movement,  and  had  come  to  be  little  more  than 
a  publisher's  magazine."  Aubrey  Beardsley  withdrew  his 
support,  and  his  pictures  now  appeared  in  the  rival  Savoy 
edited  by  Mr.  Arthur  Symons.  The  Savoy,  though  it 
enlisted  many  of  the  writers  to  the  earlier  publication,  was 
a  better  and  more  purposeful  magazine  than  the  Yellow 
Book.  In  an  editorial  note  Mr.  Symons  disclaimed  any 
epithet  for  his  contributors — Realists,  Romanticists  or 
Decadents  :  all  he  offered  was  good  work.  "  We  hope  to 
appeal  to  the  tastes  of  the  intelligent  by  not  being  original 
for  originality's  sake,  or  audacious  for  the  sake  of  adver- 
tisement, or  timid  for  the  convenience  of  the  elderly- 
minded."  To  turn  over  the  pages  of  the  Yellow  Book  now 
is  to  feel  that  we  are  handling  an  ordinary  magazine, 
better  perhaps  than  most,  yet  only  a  publisher's  magazine. 
The  Savoy  is  printed  on  poorer  paper,  and  the  illustrations 
are  often  not  well  reproduced,  but  we  are  conscious  that  it 
stands  for  something.  Ernest  Dowson,  Mr.  Symons,  Mr. 
Havelock  Ellis  write  well ;  there  is  no  narrowness  or 
limitation  in  subject  and  outlook  ;  the  contributors  to  the 
magazine  are  possessed  with  the  spirit  of  intellectual 
enthusiasm  and  curiosity,  they  are  anxious  to  discover 
and  know  life  and  the  world  in  which  they  find  them- 
selves. Mr.  Symons  writes  on  Verlaine  and  De  Goncourt, 
Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  on  Blake,  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis  on  Nietzsche, 
world-names  that  do  not  fall  into  a  natural  or  easy  con- 
junction. The  Yellow  Book  presents  chiefly  the  pose  of 
the  dilettante ;  the  Savoy  stands  for  the  earnest  and 
sincere  work  of  young  poets,  dreamers  and  students  of 
life's  meaning. 

To  the  present-day  reader  the  essays  in  authorship  of 
Aubrey  Vincent  Beardsley  (1872-98)  are  by  far  the  most 
interesting  part  of  the  Savoy,  although  these  pieces  may 
have  no  intrinsic  importance.  Beardsley  used  his  pen  very 
much  as  he  used  brush  or  pencil.  In  his  drawings  the 
line  is  clear  and  sharp  ;  the  massing  of  light  and  black- 
ness (not  shadow)  is  hard  and  precise.  The  extraordinary 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES      xxi 

effect  he  can  gain  by  this  method  is  well  illustrated  by  the 
contrasted  masses  of  black  and  white  in  "  The  Wag- 
nerites," — the  white  bosoms  of  the  women  standing  out 
against  the  darkness  of  the  theatre.  For  it  was  thus  that 
Beardsley  saw  the  world  ;  his  intellect  was  hard  and 
unemotional.  Despite  the  grotesque  fancy  of  his  designs 
he  possessed  an  almost  incisively  practical  mind.  Not 
beauty,  as  commonly  perceived,  but  the  curious,  the 
unexpected  and  the  grotesque  was  what  he  saw  ;  his 
line  had  no  direct  reference  to  the  whole  as  seen,  but  io  a 
satirical  or  psychological  representation  of  some  aspect 
of  life.  And  in  writing  his  manner  is  the  same.  Every 
sentence  was  composed  separately  for  its  own  sake,  and 
allowed  to  find  later  some  finished  niche  in  the  growing 
narrative.  His  method  reveals  the  sketcher  rather  than 
the  man  conscious  of  the  nature  of  prose.  He  contributed 
to  the  Savoy  three  poems  and  a  prose  fragment,  'Under 
the  Hill,'  a  parody  of  the  story  of  Venus  and  Tannhauser. 
Beardsley 's  prose  is  fantastic  and  artificial.  It  reaches 
the  confines  of  preciosity,  and  the  liberal  use  of  French 
words  gives  a  bizarre  and  grotesque  appearance  to  the 
sentences.  We  hear  of  an  "  ombre  gateway  "  and  doves 
that  love  "  to  froler."  Nevertheless,  the  vision  of  Beardsley 
is  always  that  of  the  artist  and  poet,  and  there  are  passages 
of  real  beauty  in  thought  and  phrasing.  On  the  first  page 
of  '  Under  the  Hill '  comes  this  exquisite  little  sentence : 
"  It  was  taper-time ;  when  the  tired  earth  puts  on  its  cloak 
of  mists  and  shadows,  when  the  enchanted  woods  are 
stirred  with  light  footfalls  and  slender  voices  of  the  fairies, 
when  all  the  air  is  full  of  delicate  influences,  and  even  the 
beaux,  seated  at  their  dressing-tables,  dream  a  little." 
The  touches  of  malicious  wit  are  good.  Of  Helen  we 
are  told  that  she  looked,  "  Not  at  all  like  the  lady  in 
'  Lempriere.'  '  His  poem,  '  The  Three  Musicians,'  has 
a  gay  note  of  satire  which  reaches  its  point ;  and 
'  The  Ballad  of  a  Barber,'  a  curious  little  piece  with  a 
grim  conclusion,  deserves  to  be  recalled  for  the  simple 
beauty  of  one  stanza — 

"  Her  gold  hair  fell  down  to  her  feet 
And  hung  about  her  pretty  eyes  ; 
She  was  as  lyrical  and  sweet 
As  one  of  Schubert's  melodies." 


xxii  INTRODUCTORY 

It  was  an  ambition  of  Beardsley's  to  be  a  great  Writer, 
for  the  author  he  seems  to  have  regarded  with  greater 
veneration  than  the  artist ;  but  had  he  lived  longer  it  is 
improbable  that  he  would  have  written  anything  save 
the  curious  and  interesting,  except  in  isolated  passages 
and  lines  of  beauty.  His  touch  is  hard  and  unsympathetic  ; 
frills  and  decorations  of  speech  divert  our  attention  from 
the  matter,  when  there  is  any;  his  conception  of  com- 
position was  limited  by  the  paragraph  and  even  by  the 
sentence.  The  faculties  which  made  Beardsley  the  most 
original  artist  in  the  bizarre  of  his  time  could  scarcely  fit 
him  to  become  a  great  writer.  Nevertheless  his  name 
cannot  well  be  dissociated  from  the  text  of  the  Savoy, 
though  his  illustrations  to  that  magazine  are  of  greater 
importance  and  value. 

Mr.  Arthur  Synions  was  the  typical  and  characteristic 
critic  and  exponent  of  those  ideas  which  animated  the 
younger  writers  of  the  Yellow  Book  and  Savoy.  Whether 
in  criticism  or  in  poetry  his  mind  was  the  most  subtle 
and  comprehensive  of  the  group  ;  and  in  himself  he 
illustrated  admirably  the  realism  and  the  mysticism  of 
different  writers  in  the  new  period.  If  we  regard  him 
merely  as  the  writer  of  realistic  poems  descriptive  of  the 
stage,  the  ballet,  or  forbidden  love,  we  do  him  an  injustice, 
for  these  are  to  him  symbols,  as  flowers  and  mists  and 
hills  were  to  Wordsworth,  an  attempt  to  perceive  in  the 
common  externals  of  everyday  life  the  ideal  of  which  the 
visible  is  only  a  garment.  Sometimes  Mr.  Symons  will 
seem  as  unshrinking  a  realist  as  Crackanthorpe,  at  other 
times  as  inevitably  mystical  as  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  :  his 
vision  of  life  is  as  subtle  as  Beardsley's  was  precise. 

As  a  critic  capable  of  original  observation  and  analysis 
Mr.  Symons  is  not  at  first  to  be  found  in  his  work.  His 
Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Browning  (1886)  is  a  good 
and  straightforward  handbook  to  the  poet ;  and  the 
essays  and  reviews  collected  in  Studies  in  Two  Literatures 
(1897)  are  too  wridely  separated  in  date  and  too  miscel- 
laneous in  character  to  present  a  homogeneous  criticism. 
Yet  several  of  these  studies  of  Elizabethan  drama,  of 
contemporary  French  and  English  writers  reveal  the  bent 
of  his  mind, — his  flexibility,  his  sympathy  with  the  French 
and  his  dreamy  intellectualism.  His  sympathy  for  the 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES    xxiii 

romantic,  slightly  unhealthy  mysticism  and  consummate 
artistry  of  Christina  Rossetti  is  intelligible,  and  not  less, 
when  writing  of  Coventry  Patmore,  his  witty  remark 
that  in  the  Victorian  scientific  generation,  "it  was  sup- 
posed that  by  adding  prose  to  poetry  you  doubled  the 
value  of  poetry."  As  we  might  expect,  his  "  Note  on 
Zola's  Method  "  is  a  direct  attack  on  Zola's  habit  of 
looking  at  life  through  a  formula  and  studying  it  with 
immense  industry  by  the  help  of  that  formula.  The 
formula  was  as  romantic  and  unreal  as  any  dream  of  the 
idealist.  Mr.  Symons,  the  dreamer,  angered  with  Zola's 
sordid  realism,  did  not  consciously  perceive  this,  although 
his  critical  instinct  seized  upon  it  in  passing,  for  he  writes, 
— "  So  powerful  is  his  imagination  that  he  has  created  a 
whole  world  which  has  no  existence  anywhere  but  in  his 
own  brain," — one  of  the  aptest  remarks  ever  made  of  the 
man  who  laboured  mightily  to  represent  life  exactly  as  it 
is.  In  these  and  other  essays  of  the  volume  we  learn  that 
we  cannot  place  Mr.  Symons  either  with  the  naturalistic 
school  or  with  the  emotional  and  sentimental  romanticists. 
The  first  of  his  books  to  present  an  individual  concep- 
tion of  the  nature  of  art  and  literature  was  The  Symbolist 
Movement  in  Literature  (1899).  The  earlier  studies  were 
written  like  any  other  reviews  and  introductions,  and 
might  have  come  from  the  hand  of  any  good  contem- 
porary :  The  Symbolist  Movement  is  something  different, 
for  here  Mr.  Symons  is  writing  of  a  school  to  which  he 
himself  belongs.  The  volume  treats  of  Gerard  de  Nerval, 
Verlaine  and  other  of  the  French  symbolists,  and  with 
them  Mr.  Symons  counts  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  to  whom  he 
dedicates  his  book.  In  Mr.  Symons'  interpretation 
symbolism  is  to  literature  what  Platonism  is  to  philosophy, 
or,  to  use  another  analogy,  what  the  art  of  Mr.  Gordon 
Craig  is  to  the  stage.  "  A  symbol  might  be  defined  as  a 
representation  which  does  not  aim  at  being  a  reproduction." 
Material  things  are  but  the  shadow  flung  on  the  wall. 
Symbolism  in  literature  is  an  effort  to  escape  the  drab  of 
realism  and  the  bounds  of  that  which  is  visible,  to  express 
by  the  use  of  words  the  beauty  of  that  ideal  world  of  which 
the  external  is  but  a  vesture.  In  symbolist  literature, 
therefore,  a  poem  exists  for  itself  as  a  thing  of  beauty, 
like  a  glearn  of  light  piercing  through  a  veil.  Language 


xxiv  INTRODUCTORY 

consists  of  tokens  and  signs,  and  art  to  the  symbolist  is 
but  an  effort  to  reflect  by  signs  and  patterns  the  beauty 
of  the  spiritual.  Thus,  in  a  sense,  symbolism  is  but  old 
romanticism  writ  intellectually. 

The  distinction  Mr.  Symons  draws  between  the  drama 
of  realism  and  symbolist  drama,  like  Villiers  de  1'Isle- 
Adam's  Axel,  helps  us  further  to  realise  the  nature  of 
symbolism.  In  realistic  drama  "  the  form  ...  is  degraded 
below  the  level  of  the  characters  whom  it  attempts  to 
express,"  for  that  type  of  dialogue  which  imitates  the 
conversation  of  everyday  life  can  express  no  more  than 
a  tithe  of  what  every  man  thinks  and  feels.  But  the  drama 
of  De  I'lsle-Adam  is  a  drama  of  spiritual  forces  and  speaks 
with  the  voice  of  man's  spirit,  not  with  the  words  of  his 
lips.  It  expresses  not  what  we  say,  but  what  we  are. 

Mr.  Symoiis'  later  volumes  of  prose  contain  some  of 
the  best  and  most  illuminating  criticism  of  recent  years, 
but  they  add  little  that  is  valuable  to  the  thought  already 
expressed  in  The  Symbolist  Movement  in  Literature.  In 
Plays,  Acting  and  Music  (1903)  short  essays,  contributed 
chiefly  to  the  Academy,  are  gathered  together.  Studies 
in  Prose  and  Verse  (1904),  a  companion  volume  to  the 
Studies  in  Two  Literatures,  embodies  several  of  the  essays 
which  appeared  in  the  earlier  book.  Few  men  would  dare 
to  publish  Studies  in  Seven  Arts  (1906)  :  even  Mr.  Symons 
must  sometimes  write  as  an  amateur,  and  his  paper  on 
cathedrals  alternates  between  mere  essay  writing  and  the 
discovery  of  sermons  in  stones.  But  when  he  speaks  of 
painting,  of  music,  of  sculpture,  of  dancing,  of  the  stage, 
he  can  always  claim  to  be  heard.  The  last  of  his  critical 
volumes,  The  Romantic  Movement  in  English  Poetry  (1909), 
is  the  least  literary  and  the  least  interesting  book  he  has 
ever  written.  Every  poet,  important  or  negligible,  who 
may,  even  by  a  wide  stretch  of  courtesy,  be  classed  with 
the  romantic  movement  at  the  close  of  the  eighteenth 
and  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  here  to  be 
found  tabulated  by  his  or  her  date  and  discussed  with  an 
intellectual  aloofness  that  makes  heavy  reading  ;  and  the 
arrangement  of  the  names  darkens  counsel  by  a  rule  that 
is  mechanical.  The  book  can  scarcely  be  read,  although 
we  may  turn  to  it  as  we  refer  to  an  encyclopaedia. 

In  the  preface  to  Plays,  Acting  and  Music  is  a  passage 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES     xxv 

which  is  worth  quotation  for  the  light  it  throws  on  Mr. 
Symons'  faith  and  doctrine  as  a  critic — 

"  In  all  my  critical  and  theoretical  writing  I  wish  to  be 
as  little  abstract  as  possible,  and  to  study  first  principles, 
not  so  much  as  they  exist  in  the  brain  of  the  theorist,  but 
as  they  may  be  discovered  alive  and  in  effective  action, 
in  every  achieved  form  of  art.  I  do  not  understand  the 
limitations  by  which  so  many  writers  on  aesthetics  choose 
to  confine  themselves  to  the  study  of  artistic  principles 
as  they  are  seen  in  this  or  that  separate  form  of  art.  Each 
art  has  its  own  laws,  its  own  capacities,  its  own  limits  ; 
these  it  is  the  business  of  the  critic  jealously  to  dis- 
tinguish. Yet,  in  the  study  of  art  as  art,  it  should  be  his 
endeavour  to  master  the  universal  science  of  beauty." 

And  the  display  of  method  here  made  is  repeated  when 
he  writes  in  Studies  in  Prose  and  Verse  that  he  is  interested 
only  in  "  first  principles,"  that  criticism  "  is  a  valuation 
of  forces,  and  it  is  indifferent  to  their  direction.  It  is 
concerned  with  them  only  as  force,  and  it  is  concerned 
with  force  only  in  its  kind  and  degree."  He  professes 
to  the  possession  of  only  a  few  principles  of  criticism, 
which,  however,  he  asserts  that  he  constantly  applies  as 
tests.  But  it  is  difficult  to  discover  what  these  tests  are. 
They  cannot  be  gathered  as  we  gather  Matthew  Arnold's 
principles.  We  may  learn  that  mysticism  and  idealism 
appeal  to  Mr.  Symons,  that  the  classical  spirit  is  revered, 
but  only  afar  off,  that  realism  is  alien  to  his  mind  and 
only  awarded  praise  when  it  appears  in  a  Balzac  or  a 
Flaubert,  whom  he  cannot  gainsay.  Flaubert  is  even 
"  the  one  impeccable  novelist."  We  see  that  though  a 
romanticist  he  is  intellectual,  distrusting  reliance  upon 
the  unaided  instincts  and  emotions  ;  and,  therefore,  he 
quarrels  with  Tolstoy's  theory  of  art.  But  to  learn  as 
much  as  this  does  not  carry  us  far,  and  a  reason  why  we 
do  not  clearly  grasp  Mr.  Symons'  principles  is  that  his 
critical  writings  consist  chiefly  of  occasional  pieces,  and 
within  themselves  the  ordering  of  matter  might  often  be 
better.  Indeed  it  is  obvious  that  Mr.  Symons  is  never 
wholly  aware  of  his  principles.  There  mingle  in  him  the 
poet,  the  scholar,  the  religious  mystic,  the  lover  of  physical 
sensations,  the  intellectualist ;  and  therefore  he  is  not 


xxvi  INTRODUCTORY 

always  consistent  nor  always  sure  of  his  ground.  Like 
Gautier  he  inclines  to  find  the  best  in  everything,  and  is 
more  quick  to  appreciate  than  to  condemn ;  and  this, 
little  as  that  side  of  the  matter  is  often  understood,  is  the 
true  business  of  criticism.  Good  criticism  will  appreciate 
wherever  it  can,  bad  criticism  alternates  between  rhapsody, 
rodomontade  and  vilification. 

Among  living  English  critics  none  other  shows  the 
range,  the  subtlety  and  the  power  of  illumination  belong- 
ing to  Mr.  Symons.  He  is  almost  equally  at  home  as  a 
critic  of  literature,  music,  acting,  dancing  and  painting  : 
his  knowledge  is  wide,  his  experience  curious,  he  has  the 
mind  of  the  student  and  the  gifts  of  the  artist.  As  a 
critic  he  stands  in  the  succession  of  Pater,  for  whom  he 
shows  an  exaggerated  respect  in  one  of  the  early  essays. 
And  his  manner,  like  that  of  Pater,  often  has  a  note  of 
cold  and  dreamy  aloofness,  although  he  has  none  of 
Pater's  sentimentality,  and  is  far  more  a  man  of  the  world. 
It  is  a  misfortune  that  he  has  trusted  almost  entirely  to 
the  short  and  occasional  essay  and  attempted  no  work  of 
wide  and  general  survey,  save  in  one  instance,  and  that 
with  unhappy  result.  When  moved  he  can  lapse  into 
exaggeration,  but  he  is  more  frequently  coldly  intellectual, 
notably  in  his  Romantic  Movement  in  English  Poetry. 
Only  too  often  in  his  critical  writings  we  seem  to  be  listen- 
ing to  the  versatile  expert  explaining  art  to  experts ;  yet 
no  twist  of  academicism  narrows  his  outlook. 

The  genius  of  Mr.  Symons  is  doubly  rich  in  a  strong 
intellectualism  and  a  dreamy  romanticism,  and  it  is  the 
possession  of  these  contrasted  tendencies  of  mind  which 
makes  him  an  important  figure  in  his  time  and  place.  His 
intellectualism  led  him  to  sympathise  in  a  degree  with 
the  work  of  French  realists  and  their  English  disciples,  his 
dreamy  romanticism  to  an  understanding  of  the  French 
Symbolists,  Blake,  and  the  Celtic  movement  in  Ireland, 
typified  in  the  person  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  Mr.  Symons 
shares  nothing  with  the  moral  or  sentimental  roman- 
ticisms of  the  Victorian  age  or  the  Byronic  romanticism 
which  preceded  them — he  is  an  intellectual  romanticist. 

Oscar  Wilde  and  the  group  of  the  Yellow  Book  have 
been  named  among  new  forces.  Less  notable,  but  stand- 
ing distinctively  for  a  new  and  vigorous  influence  was 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES   xxvii 

William  Ernest  Henley.  In  nothing  that  is  essential  can 
we  differentiate  between  Henley  the  poet  and  Henley  the 
journalist  and  critic.  He  will,  therefore,  demand  fuller 
treatment  at  a  later  stage;  and  it  is  only  necessary 
here  to  indicate  his  influence  in  fostering  a  tendency  to 
a  typically  Anglo-Saxon  noisy  verse  and  prose  of  action 
and  imperialistic  politics.  An  invalid  all  his  life,  struggling 
against  physical  disabilities  that  would  have  crushed  a 
weaker  man,  Henley  sang  loudly  the  courageous  defiance 
of  life's  ills  and  the  joy  of  tireless  doing.  He  had  a  simple 
faith  in  strong  and  efficient  men,  in  the  value  of  material 
prosperity,  he  gloried  in  the  spectacle  of  British  imperial 
rule,  and  he  lived  long  enough  to  blow  the  trumpet  of 
patriotism  in  the  days  of  the  Boer  War,  with  as  ready  a 
faith  as  any  religious  fanatic  that  the  Lord  was  on  his 
side.  Henley  had  an  admirable  gift  for  discovering 
talent  in  others,  and  it  was  chiefly  as  an  editor  that 
he  came  directly  into  contact  with  the  younger  men  of 
his  time  and  assisted  them.  Among  these  were  Mr. 
Rudyard  Kipling,  George  Warrington  Steevens  (1869- 
1900),  the  war  correspondent,  and  Sir  Gilbert  Parker,  who 
may  be  named  as  severally  illustrating  in  some  degree  the 
manner  and  influence  of  Henley.  In  1877-78  he  was 
editor  of  the  weekly,  London,  and  published  in  its  pages 
Stevenson's  New  Arabian  Nights.  From  1882-86  he  sup- 
ported Whistler  and  interpreted  the  genius  of  Rodin  to 
England  in  the  Magazine  of  Art.  In  1889  he  became  editor 
of  the  Scots  Observer,  and  when  this  was  removed  to 
London  in  1891,  as  the  National  Observer,  Henley  became 
a  powerful  influence.  He  gathered  round  him  a  large 
band  of  notable  contributors— R.  L.  Stevenson,  T.  E. 
Brown,  G.  W.  Steevens,  Andrew  Lang,  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy, 
Mr.  J.  M.  Barrie,  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling,  Mr.  Arthur 
Morrison,  Mr.  G.  S.  Street,  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  Mr.  W.  B. 
Yeats,  H.  D.  Lowry  and  Mrs.  Rosamund  Marriott  Watson. 
Not  all  these,  if  any,  can  be  counted  among  his  direct 
followers,  but  it  was  impossible  to  come  into  contact 
with  Henley  without  receiving  some  influence  from  the 
vigorous  and  independent  personality  of  the  man  and 
the  writer.  Henley  was  more  than  one  among  many 
others  ;  he  represented  an  interpretation  in  new  terms  of 
a  cult  well  known  forty  years  before  he  made  it  popular 


xxviii  INTRODUCTORY 

again.  He  is  the  muscular  agnostic,  the  counter-part  in 
the  world  of  Kingsley  in  the  Church.  As  Kingsley  talked 
in  a  loud  voice  to  reassure  himself  in  the  dark,  so  does 
Henley  ;  as  Kingsley  was  constitutionally  incapable  of 
thinking  for  himself,  but  an  admirable  interpreter  to  the 
masses  of  other  men's  thoughts,  so  was  Henley ;  as 
Kingsley  had,  on  occasion,  one  of  the  best  ears  for  metre 
of  any  poet  in  the  last  century,  so  had  Henley ;  and 
further  they  were  fellows  in  a  tendency  to  moods  of 
vigorous  Anglo-Saxon  melancholy.  These  lines  might  well 
have  been  written  by  Kingsley — 

"So,  till  darkness  cover 

Life's  retreating  gleam, 
Lover  follows  lover, 

Dream  succeeds  to  dream. 

"Stoop  to  my  endeavour, 

O  my  love,  and  be 
Only  and  for  ever 

Sun  and  stars  to  me." 

(Echoes,  xvi.) 

Like  Kingsley 's  verse  it  is  at  once  strong  and  pretty,  and 
it  has  no  subtlety. 

Henley  was  the  strong  and  happy  invalid,  bravely 
encouraging  himself  in  a  belief  that  life  was  good  ;  and, 
because  he  possessed  so  few  of  life's  material  benefits,  he 
was  inclined,  like  Whitman,  to  preach  material  prosperity 
as  a  gospel,  admiring  in  others  the  power  to  win  success 
from  adverse  circumstance.  He  was  not  a  thinker,  but 
he  had  a  good  historical  sense,  a  passionate  enthusiasm 
for  individual  men  and  women,  a  love  of  great  causes  in 
their  concrete  manifestations,  and  he  was  thus  fitted  to 
lead  and  inspire,  if  not  to  illuminate. 

In  the  same  years  a  fourth  distinctive  literary  move- 
ment, more  important  and  more  productive  of  fine  and 
enduring  work  than  any  of  the  three  named,  makes  its 
appearance.  The  Irish  literary  movement  represents  the 
awakening  of  a  new  sense  of  national  consciousness.  Its 
aims  have  not  been  single,  the  workers  have  followed 
different  paths,  but  the  faith  has  been  one,  and  a  race- 
consciousness  has  inspired  in  the  writers  of  the  Irish 
school  a  type  of  literature  impossible  in  a  city  so  cosmo- 


NEW  INFLUENCES  AND  TENDENCIES     xxix 

politan  as  London,  the  whirlpool  toward  which  nearly  all 
English  writing  is  attracted.  In  England  writers  have 
little  sense  of  common  race  and  faith,  each  man  shuts 
himself  in  his  own  workshop  or  shares  his  opportunities 
with  a  few  others,  and  his  work  emerges  as  whole  as  it 
may  from  the  unresting  conflict  of  hostile  thoughts  and 
ideals.  The  writers  of  the  Irish  literary  movement, 
diverse  as  the  results  may  be,  have  a  knowledge  of  com- 
munity in  fellowship  and  work.  The  movement  has  pro- 
duced a  poetry  of  mysticism  and  national  consciousness 
in  the  writings  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  '  A.  E.'  (Mr.  George 
Russell),  Mr.  Padraic  Colum,  Moira  O'Neill  and  others  ; 
the  finest  example  for  over  a  century  of  English  literary 
drama  in  the  work  of  J.  M.  Syiige  ;  and  a  scholarship  to 
illumine  the  older  life  and  poetry  of  Ireland  in  the  person 
of  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde. 

Ireland,  by  virtue  of  her  position,  has  been  saved  from 
the  prosperity  and  all-devouring  commercialism  of  modern 
Europe.  She  is  still,  as  she  was  centuries  since,  a  small 
island  of  the  western  seas,  poor  and  religious.  It  is  the 
hope  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  and  those  who  are  with  him 
that  they  may  some  day  spread  in  their  country  "  a 
tradition  of  life  that  makes  neither  for  great  wealth  nor 
great  poverty,  that  makes  the  arts  a  natural  expression 
of  life,  that  permits  even  common  men  to  understand 
good  art  and  high  thinking,  and  to  have  the  fine  manners 
these  things  can  give."  The  ideal  is  high  and  inspiring, 
but  it  stands  on  a  level  with  the  attempts  to  revive  handi- 
crafts or  folksong  among  cottagers  living  in  an  age  of 
bleak  industrialism.  The  times  will  prove  too  much  for 
the  Gaelic  League  and  the  Celtic  Revival ;  but  a  losing 
fight  nobly  played  is  more  inspiring  and  valuable  than 
overwhelming  victories  easily  gained.  The  Irish  literary 
movement,  as  a  movement,  will  expire  and  leave  no  mark 
on  practical  life ;  but  it  will  leave  some  dreams  and  a  little 
good  art  to  be  remembered  when  the  commercial  triumphs 
of  our  age  are  forgotten  and  have  ceased  to  interest  the 
men  of  another  time.  The  end  of  all  great  religious  and 
artistic  movements  is  not  that  they  achieve  their  end, 
but  that  they  inspire  the  work  of  a  few  individuals. 


PART   I 

POETRY 


CHAPTER  I 

POETS    OF    THE    TRANSITION 

Oscar  Wilde — Alfred  Austin — Robert  Bridges— Watts-Dunton — Andrew 
Lang — Edmund  Gosse — Wilfrid  Scawen  Blunt — Alice  Meynell — 
Margaret  Louisa  Woods. 

THE  process  of  history  is  comparable  to  a  gardener  digging 
leaf-mould  in  a  lane  and  sifting  out  the  coarse  particles 
till  the  fine  earth  is  left  for  use  in  his  flower-beds.  The 
results  of  man's  practical  activity  pass  through  the  sieve 
of  time  and  are  quickly  refined  by  the  demand  of  utili- 
tarianism. In  other  words  the  history  of  human  life  is 
the  story  of  a  ceaseless  process  of  valuations.  The  writer 
of  contemporary  history  is  severely  handicapped,  for  he 
works  unaided  in  his  estimates  ;  he  must  judge  as  best 
he  may  without  the  help  of  time's  sifting  process.  The 
historian  of  literature  is  not  only  faced  with  complica- 
tions more  intricate  and  less  defined,  but  for  him  time 
valuations  work  themselves  out  more  slowly.  He  may 
distinguish  between  writers  and  groups  of  writers  in  con- 
temporary literature,  but  he  cannot  pretend  to  give  a 
reasoned  survey  of  their  ultimate  significance.  Nor  can 
he  safely  mark  the  stages  at  which  a  mode  of  thought,  a 
fashion  in  writing,  is  lost,  and  its  place  taken  by  a  new 
mode,  a  new  fashion.  But,  if  all  judgments  of  contem- 
porary writers  must  be  tentative,  it  is  to  be  remembered, 
on  the  other  hand,  that  no  literature  concerns  us  more 
closely  than  that  which  is  being  written  in  our  own  life- 
time. No  reader,  no  writer  is  strong  enough  to  resist 
his  time  and  place.  Thoughts  and  aims  quickly  modify 
in  every  few  years,  and  a  general  knowledge,  even  if 
inaccurate  in  detail,  of  the  literature  of  the  day  cannot 
be  without  a  personal  value.  Further,  however  impartial 
may  be  the  ideal  in  study  and  criticism,  the  personal 
equation  must  weigh  more  strongly  than  in  our  attitude 


4  POETRY  [PART  i 

toward  a  literature  which  has  passed  through  the  rocking 
sieve  of  the  years. 

In  the  year  1890  the  great  work  of  poets  representative 
of  later  Victorian  days  was  already  a  thing  of  the  past. 
Swinburne  and  Meredith,  to  name  but  two,  overlived  the 
dividing  line  by  nearly  twenty  years,  but  they  added 
nothing  of  outstanding  importance  to  the  tale  of  their 
work.  There  are,  on  the  other  hand,  a  few  poets,  either 
living  or  only  recently  dead,  who  had  gained  their  dis- 
tinctive standing  before  1890,  whom  it  is  difficult  not  to 
name  in  a  transitional  chapter,  for  they  belong  almost 
equally  to  the  story  of  this  generation  and  a  generation 
that  is  gone.  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  for  example,  as  a 
novelist  virtually  finished  his  work  many  years  since, 
but  his  poetry  is  of  fresh  significance,  and  derives  in 
nothing  from  the  Victorian  traditions.  As  a  poet  he 
must  be  placed  in  another  chapter  with  the  younger 
generation.  Among  those  whose  work  may  be  taken  as 
an  instance  of  overlapping  may  be  named  Oscar  Wilde, 
Alfred  Austin,  the  late  poet  laureate,  his  successor, 
Mr.  Robert  Bridges,  Andrew  Lang,  Watts-Dunton,  Mr. 
Edmund  Gosse  and  a  few  others.  The  inclusion  of  these 
poets  in  a  single  chapter  is  dictated  not  by  the  recognition 
of  any  peculiar  unity  in  their  methods,  but  by  the  fact 
that  though  much  of  their  work  antedates  the  period  of 
our  survey  it  is  impossible  to  dissociate  them  from  the 
living  poetry  of  more  recent  years. 

Oscar  O'Flahertie  Wills  Wilde  was  born  in  Dublin,  and 
early  imbibed  literary  leanings  from  his  mother,  who 
wrote  under  the  pseudonym  of  '  Speranza.' 
Oscar  Wilde,  At  Oxford  Wilde  won  the  Newdigate  Prize 
1856-1900.  in  1878  with  a  poem  on  Ravenna.  At  Oxford, 
further,  he  adopted  his  life-long  pose  as  the 
aesthete,  filled  his  rooms  with  blue  china  and  art  trifles, 
cultivated  the  manners  of  the  complete  idler,  but  suc- 
ceeded in  taking  a  first-class  in  Classical  Moderations  and 
literae  humaniores.  Already  he  had  written  poems  which 
appeared  in  various  periodicals.  A  selection  of  these 
early  pieces  was  printed  as  Poems  by  Oscar  Wilde  (1881). 
The  chief  additions  to  this  volume  were  The  Sphinx  (1894), 
in  the  metre  of  In  Memoriam,  and  The  Ballad  of  Reading 
Gaol  (1898). 


CHAP,  i]        POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  5 

Wilde's  poetry  is  not  an  important  part  of  his  life's 
work.  In  the  volume  of  1881  he  is  frankly  imitative  of 
many  poets.  Much  of  his  early  poetry  resembles  a  decora- 
tive dado,  it  lacks  intensity  and  sincere  feeling.  Among 
the  longer  poems  '  The  Burden  of  Itys  '  is  noteworthy, 
among  the  shorter  the  beautiful  and  unaffected  little 
dirge,  '  Requiescat,'  suggested  by  the  death  of  his  sister 
in  childhood,  and  several  of  the  sonnets,  especially  the 
fine  '  Madonna  Mia,'  are  good.  The  Sphinx,  a  record  of 
"  amours  frequent  and  free,"  is  a  more  individual  utter- 
ance than  any  of  the  earlier  poems ;  but  The  Ballad  of 
Reading  Gaol,  written  when  Wilde  came  out  of  prison, 
is  by  far  his  greatest  piece  of  writing,  whether  in  prose 
or  verse.  The  style,  the  plaining  recurrence  of  word 
melody,  the  imagery,  all  convey  a  haunting  picture  of 
prison  cell  and  high-walled  yard,  where — 

" — each  day  is  like  a  year,, 
A  year  whose  days  are  long." 

And  the  repetition  with  slight  changes  of  the  sad  stanza — 

"  I  never  saw  a  man  who  looked 

With  such  a  wistful  eye 
Upon  that  little  tent  of  blue 

Which  prisoners  call  the  sky, 
And  at  every  drifting  cloud  that  went 

With  sails  of  silver  by." 

is  a  striking  example  of  the  effective  use  of  echo  and 
refrain.  Wilde  here  adopts,  with  immense  gain,  a  simple 
language  in  place  of  a  decorative.  The  poem  comes  from 
the  heart  of  a  man  who  has  been  through  the  valley  of 
shadows,  and  nothing  written  by  Wilde  has  the  same 
enduring  quality  as  The  Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol.  Yet 
none  of  his  writing  in  verse  is  of  special  importance  ;  nor 
can  it  be  said  that  English  poetry  would  be  regrettably 
poorer  had  Wilde  never  written  save  in  prose. 

For  over  forty  years  Tennyson  held  the  office  of  poet 
laureate,  and,  if  many  were  inclined  to  agree  with  Fitz- 
gerald that  after  the  volumes  of  1842  all  changes  in 
Tennyson  were  changes  for  the  worse,  few  questioned  his 
fitness  to  represent  officially  the  poetry  of  England.  More 
comprehensively  than  any  poet  of  his  time  he  expressed 


6  POETRY  [PART  i 

in  beautiful  words  the  average  mind  of  the  Victorian  age 
in  its  best  hopes  and  ideals.  The  choice  of  a  successor  to 
Tennyson  left  the  Prime  Minister,  Lord  Salisbury,  in  a 
dilemma.  In  poetic  genius  Swinburne  was  indubitably 
pre-eminent,  but  the  scandal  of  Poems  and  Ballads  (1866) 
still  clung  to  him,  and  his  political  views  were  a  difficulty  ; 
and  Sir  (at  that  time  Mr.)  William  Watson,  who  might, 
in  default  of  Swinburne,  have  hoped  for  the  appointment, 
was,  on  the  ground  of  his  radicalism,  at  a  disadvantage. 
The  Prime  Minister  refused  to  yield  immediately  to  the 
claims  definitely  advanced  by  Sir  Edwin  Arnold,  Sir 
Lewis  Morris,  Alfred  Austin  and  others.  The  post  was 
kept  open  till  the  announcement  was  made  on  New  Year's 
Day,  1896,  that  the  Queen  approved  the  appointment  of 
Alfred  Austin,  who  enjoyed  a  record  for  unblemished 
patriotism  if  not  for  any  remarkable  talent  as  a  poet. 

Alfred  Austin  was  born  near  Leeds,  and  educated  at 
Stonyhurst  and  Oscott  in  the  Roman  Catholic  faith  of 
his  father.  After  taking  his  degree  at  the 
Alfred  Austin,  University  of  London  he  entered  at  the 
1835-1913.  Inner  Temple,  and  was  called  to  the  Bar 
in  1857.  But  on  his  father's  death  he 
abandoned  the  profession  of  law,  and  after  some  years 
became  an  active  journalist,  especially  in  connection  with 
the  Standard,  a  paper  for  which  he  wrote  conservative 
leaders.  And  as  a  capable  journalist  he  won  well-deserved 
success. 

He  began  to  write  verse  early,  and  first  drew  attention 
to  himself  with  The  Season  (1861),  a  satire  composed  in 
rhyming  couplets  after  the  manner  of  Dryden  and  Pope, 
with  an  admixture  of  Byron.  And  to  the  end  of  his  life 
Byron  was  the  strong  influence  in  moulding  his  poetry. 
His  later  work  may  be  divided  into  poetic  drama  and 
volumes  of  lyric  verse.  The  five  large  poetic  dramas  are 
The  Tower  of  Babel  (1874),  Savonarola  (1881),  England's 
Darling  (1896),  Prince  Lucifer  (1887),  and  Fortunatus,  The 
Pessimist  (1892).  In  the  first  three  Alfred  Austin  attacked 
by  implication  the  degrading  materialism  of  modern 
England.  The  philosophical  poems,  Fortunatus  and 
Prince  Lucifer,  exhibit  the  necessity  of  faith  in  a  moral 
and  spiritual  law,  a  moral  law  founded  upon  the  con- 
servative tendencies  of  society.  None  of  these  longer 


CHAP,  i]         POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  7 

poems  revealed  Austin  as  a  profound  or  original  thinker, 
but  they  showed  a  man  who  had  a  message  for  his  age, 
a  message  which  he  was  able  to  express  with  a  directness 
and  force  not  contemptible,  and  a  poet  capable  of  writing 
sufficiently  good  if  not  very  imaginative  blank  verse.  He 
is  no  fanatic,  yet  eagerly  at  war  with  the  false  luxury  of 
his  age  ;  and  without  prejudice  against  other  countries 
he  is  convinced  that  England  is  the  best  of  fatherlands. 
Patriotic  love  of  fatherland  is  the  constant  theme  of  his 
shorter  lyrics ;  and  in  his  more  ambitious  poems,  of 
which  the  best  are  Fortunatus  and  Prince  Lucifer,  he 
expounds  his  philosophy  of  life,  and  that  theory,  like 
his  patriotism,  is  bound  up  with  perfervid  conservatism. 
With  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  he  would  agree  that  man's  hopes, 
ideals,  and  his  salvation  rest  upon  memory  and  the 
associations  of  the  past.  He  believed  that  the  common 
ethical  and  spiritual  tradition  of  man  is  valid.  And  the 
patriotism  which  he  never  wearied  of  preaching  sprang 
from  the  strong  historical  sense  with  which  he  was  imbued. 

But  lyrical  genius  is  rarely  knit  with  historic  sense. 
The  world's  lyrical  poets,  Shakespeare  included,  cared 
nothing  for  history  as  a  chronicle  of  immutable  facts. 
Alfred  Austin,  with  his  objective  and  common-sense 
attitude,  had  not  the  true  gift  of  the  lyrical  poet,  and  even 
his  philosophical  poems  are  based  on  maxims  of  expediency 
drawn  from  history  rather  than  upon  any  theory  of  meta- 
physical necessity.  The  dramas  named  illustrate  this  fact, 
and  almost  better  The  Conversion  of  Winckelmann  (1897), 
a  dramatic  monologue  in  blank  verse,  and  one  of  Alfred 
Austin's  most  successful  poems.  The  character  of 
Winckelmann  is  admirably  exhibited  ;  his  argument  with 
himself — whether  or  no  for  the  sake  of  his  life's  pursuit 
to  confess  obedience  (not  intellectual  assent)  to  Rome,  is 
a  matter-of-fact  mental  debate  plainly  within  the  cognis- 
ance of  the  poet.  The  subtler  mind  of  Bishop  Blougram 
would  not  be  intelligible  to  him. 

Alfred  Austin's  lyrics  are  chiefly  patriotic  pieces,  idylls 
of  pastoral  life,  poems  of  nature  and  love  songs.  His 
inspiration  flows  chiefly  from  a  love  of  England  as  a  nation 
with  an  historic  past,  as  a  land  of  green  and  quiet  wood- 
lands, meadows,  flowery  lanes  and  rose-embowered  home- 
steads. With  a  persistent  naivety  he  preached  that  the 


8  POETRY  [PART  i 

country  is  better  than  the  town,  a  defensible  position, 
and  the  disputable  theory  that  country  environment  has 
been  the  inspiration  of  most  great  poetry  from  the  earliest 
times  to  the  date  of  his  own  writing.  Whatever  may  be 
our  judgment  on  the  poetic  value  of  his  shorter  pieces, 
it  is  impossible  not  to  feel  respect  for  his  genuine  love  of 
fatherland  and  the  peace  of  the  country-side.  To  the 
question  he  asks  in  a  deplorable  line — 

"  Don't  you  think  that  silence  and  stillness  are  the  sweetest 
of  all  our  joys?  " 

he  has  but  one  answer.  His  poems  of  pastoral  life,  never 
strongly  human  or  realistic,  are  written  in  the  manner 
of  Tennyson's  earlier  idylls.  '  A  Farmhouse  Dirge ' 
immediately  recalls  '  The  May  Queen.'  Others  are  pleasant, 
matter-of-fact  and  characterless.  And  the  patriotic 
lyrics,  though  spirited  and  written  unto  edification,  have 
little  power  of  stimulating  the  imagination  or  exciting 
sudden  enthusiasm. 

In  later  years  Alfred  Austin  wrote  two  more  philosophic 
poems,  The  Door  of  Humility  (1906)  and  Sacred  and  Profane 
Love  (1908).  The  first  is  not  unlike  In  Memoriam  in  form, 
although  in  theme  it  is  an  appeal  to  history  and  not  to 
intuitive  faith  ;  the  second  contrasts  worldly  ambition 
with  spiritual  idealism  in  the  guise  of  the  literary  career 
at  its  highest. 

Although  Alfred  Austin  scarcely  understood  the  use  of 
language  in  a  higher  and  imaginative  connotation  he  could 
write  good  verse,  both  rhymed  and  unrhymed,  and  on 
occasion  he  can  surprise  us  with  the  magic  of  true  poetry, 
as  in  these  lines  from  The  Conversion  of  Winckelmann — 

"  In  dreary  Stendhal  with  its  grass-grown  ways, 
Where  everything's  forgotten,  and  the  wind 
Wails  over  sand  and  unremembered  bones.'' 

But  when  he  labours  to  astonish,  as  in  the  closing  lines  of 
his  poem  to  '  George  Eliot,'  he  only  achieves  a  stucco 
grandiosity. 

Unfortunately  Austin  began  with  a  theory  of  poetry 
which  he  set  forth  with  admirable  precision  in  his  critical 
books,  The  Poetry  of  the  Period  (1870)  and  The  Bridling  of 
Pegasus  (1910).  The  chief  source  of  offence  in  his  theory 


CHAP,  i]         POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  9 

is  an  excessive  admiration  of  Byron  and  the  extemporary 
method  of  composition.  According  to  this  doctrine  the 
poet  is  best  advised  to  use  the  words  that  come  unsought, 
expressing  himself  simply  and  artlessly  without  excessive 
elaboration.  In  consequence  Austin's  poetry  is  blotched 
with  grammatical  perversities,  rich  in  passages  of  sheer 
colloquialism,  vulgar  slang,  awkward  and  insecure  sen- 
tences, and  an  untold  quantity  of  useless  chenille.  His 
admiration  for  Byron  was  a  piece  of  incongruous  per- 
versity. Except  for  his  tendency  to  the  commonplace  he 
had  nothing  in  common  with  Byron.  But  he  had  much 
in  common  with  Pope.  Like  Pope's  his  mind  was  logical 
and  ratiocinative,  only  redeemed  by  a  limited  faculty  of 
poetic  feeling  and  expression.  Byron,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  intensely  subjective  ;  and  Austin  produced  his  poetry 
by  objective  methods  which  share  nothing  with  the 
impetuous  spontaneity  of  Byron.  If  any  poet  had  ever 
need  to  exercise  care  and  pains  that  poet  was  Alfred 
Austin :  he  chose  the  other  way,  and  with  unhappy 
results,  only  accentuated  by  the  superiority  of  some 
poems,  such  as  Prince  Lucifer  and  a  few  of  the  lyrics,  in 
which  he  failed  to  practise  his  theory. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  discover  a  contrast  greater  than 
that  between  the  ragged  and  irregular  poetry  of  Alfred 

Austin  and  the  deliberate  and  exquisite 
Robert  Bridges,  word-music  of  Mr.  Robert  Bridges,  his 
b.  1844.  successor  in  the  office  of  poet  laureate. 

Among  living  English  poets  none  has  a  name 
more  to  be  held  in  honour  for  the  rare  and  delicate  beauty 
of  his  work,  for  the  respect  he  has  shown  for  his  art,  and 
for  the  light  he  has  thrown  upon  the  laws  and  secrets  of 
English  versification.  His  Account  of  Milton's  Prosody 
(1893)  and  the  occasional  essays  distributed  in  various 
periodicals  have  done  more  than  any  recent  writings  to 
excite  interest  in  the  study  of  metre.  It  is  not,  however, 
by  these  nor  by  his  eight  verse  plays,  nor  by  the  long  and 
beautiful  early  poem,  Eros  and  Psyche  (1885),  that  he  is 
likely  to  be  remembered  in  the  future,  but  by  the  sonnet 
group,  The  Growth  of  Love  (1889),  and  by  the  five  books  of 
Shorter  Poems,  first  collected  in  complete  form  in  1894. 
Especially  in  the  Shorter  Poems,  and  in  a  few  lyrics  of  later 
years,  such  as  the  exquisite  '  Winter  Nightfall,'  is  Mr. 


10  POETRY  [PART  i 

Bridges'  art  seen  at  its  best.  He  is  conversant  with  all 
that  is  best  in  classical  poetry  and  in  the  work  of  our 
Elizabethan  and  Caroline  poets  ;  and  no  one  has  caught 
so  surely  the  ethereal  and  transient  lightness  of  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  century  cadences.  His  subtleties  of  word- 
music  have  been  sought,  they  are  deliberate  and  con- 
scious, but  art  is  concealed  in  the  fulfilment  of  the  poet's 
intent.  Each  one  of  these  shorter  poems  is  a  mosaic  in 
beautiful  word-pattern,  each  word  chosen  with  perfect 
fitness  to  serve  its  double  function  of  expressing  thought 
and  enhancing  the  melody  of  the  whole.  Poems  such  as 
'  The  Winnowers  '  and  '  The  Cliff-Top  '  are  in  imagination 
the  slightest  impressionism,  but  in  delicacy  of  music  and 
perfect  beauty  of  language  among  the  most  exquisite  of 
English  lyrics.  And  to  name  two  poems  is  to  remember  a 
score  with  equal  claims  to  notice.  Mr.  Bridges'  short 
lyrics,  as  a  whole,  are  the  most  perfect  work  in  pure  prosody, 
in  magic  of  cadence,  since  Herriek,  Carew,  Drummond 
and  the  Caroline  poets. 

In  content,  in  thought,  in  imaginative  power  Mr.  Bridges' 
work  does  not,  on  the  other  hand,  claim  any  distinctive 
place.  His  poems  are  idylls  and  songs  of  graceful  love, 
vignettes  of  landscape  and  meadowed  valleys,  glimpses 
into  a  serene  and  undisturbed  mind.  He  has  never  felt 
with  sufficient  intensity  to  be  a  great  poet.  He  has 
written  of  himself — 

"  But  since  I  have  found  the  beauty  of  joy 

I  have  done  with  proud  dismay  : 
For  howsoe'er  man  hug  his  care 
The  best  of  his  art  is  gay." 

And  if  a  pensive  melancholy  visits  Mr.  Bridges,  the 
"  proud  dismay  "  of  greater  poets  can  hardly  have  touched 
him  at  any  time.  All  his  work  is  the  reflex  of  a  serene, 
a  shy  and  cultured  mind  far  removed  from  the  stress  of 
the  world's  endeavours  and  battles.  The  life  of  our  day 
with  its  philosophies,  sciences,  social  unrest  and  its  out- 
break against  the  strongholds  of  tradition  and  faith  might 
not  be,  so  far  as  the  content  of  Mr.  Bridges'  poetry  is  con- 
cerned. His  lyrics  are  the  work  of  the  scholar,  the  recluse 
and  the  prosodist,  gifted  with  a  true  and  constant  but 
not  a  strong  emotional  response  to  life. 


CHAP,  i]        POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  11 

Walter  Theodore  Watts-Dunton  is  another  of  the 
scholarly  poets.  For  thirty  years  he  lived  in  Putney  with 
Swinburne ;  before  the  close  of  the 
Walter  Theodore  century  he  was  well  past  middle  age  ; 
Watts-Dunton,  but  The  Coming  of  Love,  his  single 
1836-1914.  important  volume  of  poetry,  did  not 

appear  till  1897.  As  a  boy  he  came  into 
touch  with  gipsy  life  in  East  Anglia,  and  in  early  man- 
hood he  made  the  acquaintance  of  George  Borrow.  His 
knowledge  of  gipsy  superstition  and  folklore  and  his  friend- 
ship with  Borrow  became  the  two  strong  creative  influences 
of  his  life.  The  Coming  of  Love  and  Aylwin  (1898)  set  out, 
the  one  in  verse,  the  other  in  prose,  the  romance  of  gipsy 
life. 

But  Watts-Dunton  owed  no  part  of  his  scholarly 
fastidiousness  to  Borrow  or  the  gipsies.  His  preoccupa- 
tion with  criticism  induced  in  him  a  discontent  with  less 
than  perfection,  and,  after  a  long  lifetime,  virtually  the 
whole  of  his  original  work  is  to  be  found  in  a  volume  of 
verse  and  one  novel.  In  1875  he  joined  the  staff  of  the 
Athenceum  and  for  twenty-three  years  contributed  to  that 
paper  articles  and  reviews  of  outstanding  distinction  for 
their  style,  originality  and  wide  range  of  knowledge.  He 
also  wrote  a  number  of  articles  for  the  Encyclopaedia 
Britannica,  including  the  splendid  and  exhaustive  essay 
on  poetry,  the  crowning  work  of  his  life  as  a  critic. 

His  original  writing  was  done  largely  in  the  intervals 
of  continuous  critical  study  and  exposition.  The  Coming 
of  Love  is  a  series  of  poems  written  in  widely  separated 
years  and  united  by  a  background  of  gipsy  life  and  the 
narrative  of  the  loves  of  Percy  Aylwin  and  Rhona  Boswell. 
The  series  holds  a  place  by  itself,  and  is  as  unique  in 
modern  English  poetry  as  is  the  autobiographic  fiction  of 
Borrow  in  prose.  These  poems  do  not  reveal  Watts- 
Dunton  as  a  spontaneous  and  lyric  poet  with  gifts  of  the 
highest  order  ;  they  show  a  mind  steeped  in  the  finer 
influences  of  nature  and  literature.  Their  charm  lies  in 
the  emotional  rendering  of  nature :  the  theme  of  the  series 
is  not  the  love-story,  but  the  revelation  of  a  natura  benigna. 
Not  all  these  poems  are  successful,  and,  on  the  whole, 
the  best  are  those  which  avoid  gipsy  dialect.  "  Gipsy 
Heather,"  for  example,  gains  greatly  in  purity  of  emotion 


12  POETRY  [PART  i 

and  in  music  by  the  sinking  of  realism.  In  one  sense 
Watts-Dunton  knew  too  much  about  poetry  to  be  a 
wholly  spontaneous  and  magical  poet.  Beautiful  as  are 
many  of  the  descriptive  passages,  they  come  of  fore- 
thought, and  are  neither  sudden  nor  inevitable  in  con- 
ception or  expression. 

Nor  can  Watts-Dunton  be  accounted  entirely  successful 
in  that  poem  of  lyrical  narrative  and  dialogue,  '  Christmas 
at  the  Mermaid.'  His  greatest  achievement  as  a  poet  lies 
in  his  sonnets  which  give  him  a  place  of  honour  among 
English  sonnet-writers  of  all  time.  The  strict  limitations 
of  the  form  suited  his  slow  and  deliberate  manner.  Nearly 
all  his  sonnets  are  good,  the  rise  and  reflux  of  octave  and 
sestet  almost  always  admirably  handled.  And,  although 
his  critical  instinct  inclined  him  to  condemn  argumentative 
poetry,  he  wrote  two  fine  sequences  of  philosophical 
sonnets  in  '  A  Grave  by  the  Sea  '  and  '  The  Silent  Voices.' 
The  latter  series,  especially,  is  an  exquisite  and  beautiful 
piece  of  writing.  Yet  his  poetry,  if  never  commonplace, 
never  reads  as  the  outcome  of  involuntary  and  uncon- 
scious rapture.  He  has  the  gift  of  thought  and  a  true 
emotion,  but  he  succeeds  best  in  restricted  metrical  forms, 
for  his  mind  is  that  of  the  scholar,  slow,  thoughtful  and 
orderly,  rather  than  that  of  the  artist,  swift  and  intense. 
And  therefore  The  Coming  of  Love,  although  a  volume  to 
be  set  above  the  greater  part  of  contemporary  poetry, 
is  not  a  book  of  equal  importance  with  others  whose  content 
of  labour  and  thought  is  by  comparison  slight. 

Among  other  writers  of  the  older  generation,  primarily 
men  of  letters  and  secondarily  poets,  are  to  be  named 
Andrew  Lang  and  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse. 
Andrew  Lang,  Regarded  strictly  as  a  man  of  letters,  and 
1844-1912.  not  as  a  sympathetic  observer  of  contem- 
porary life,  Andrew  Lang  was  one  of  the 
most  remarkable  men  of  his  time  in  Europe.  His  range 
of  knowledge  and  his  power  of  work  were  astonishing. 
In  the  easy  sweep  with  which  he  covered  several  domains 
of  literature,  in  the  swiftness  combined  with  grasp  and 
accuracy  with  which  he  wrote  he  has  rarely  had  a  rival. 
He  described  himself  as  a  born  reader,  reading  as  naturally 
and  continuously  as  he  breathed,  and  the  consequence  is 
that,  despite  his  vast  stores  of  knowledge,  he  was  the 


CHAP,  i]         POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  18 

inferior  of  at  least  one  or  two  contemporaries  in  any  single 
field.  A  scintillation  of  wit,  a  gift  of  style,  at  once  light 
yet  almost  impeccably  good,  lent  distinction  to  all  his 
work.  In  his  earlier  years,  when  he  first  came  to  London 
to  follow  the  vocation  of  man  of  letters,  his  chief  interest 
lay  with  verse,  and  Helen  of  Troy  (1882)  was  written  under 
the  influence  of  a  strong  ambition  to  produce  a  poem 
worthy  his  own  ideals  of  English  poetry.  His  disappoint- 
ment at  the  poor  reception  of  the  poem  turned  him  to 
light  and  occasional  verse,  which  he  had  already  practised 
in  Ballades  in  Blue  China  (1880).  There  followed  Rhymes 
a  la  Mode  (1884),  Grass  of  Parnassus  (1888),  New  Collected 
Rhymes  (1905),  and  other  volumes  of  slight  verse.  One 
of  the  strong  influences  under  which  Lang  fell  was  his 
love  for  French  romantic  literature  in  its  wit  and  dex- 
terity, and  this,  with  modern  variations,  he  reflected  in 
some  of  the  best  light  verse  written  in  recent  years. 

In  1911  Mr.  Gosse  collected  his  verse  in  a  single  volume 
with  a  modest  preface  in  which  he  tells  us  that  the  poems 

"  belong  in  essence  to  a  period  which  has 
Edmund  Gosse,  ceased  to  exist,  to  an  age  which  is  as  dead 
b.  1849.  as  the  dodo."  The  truth  of  the  matter  is 

rather  that  the  poems  here  collected  belong 
to  the  great  tradition  of  English  poetry,  which  may,  under 
all  aberrations,  be  recognised  for  the  same  in  each  suc- 
cessive age.  He  has  never  been  interested,  save  as  student, 
in  the  fevered  attempts  of  discontented  strivers  after 
originality  to  divert  little  rivulets  to  turn  their  private 
mill-wheels.  Mr.  Gosse  makes  no  pretence  to  originality. 
There  are  many  echoes  in  his  verse  of  the  poets  who 
inspired  him  in  his  youth, — Tennyson,  Browning,  Rossetti, 
Swinburne  ;  there  are  imitations  of  French  forms,  and 
among  French  poets  he  owes  much  to  Leconte  de  Lisle, 
to  whom  he  has  written  some  fine  memorial  stanzas.  In 
technique  he  is  invariably  exact ;  and,  if  he  is  rarely  full 
of  matter,  he  is  not  often  thin  or  purposeless.  On  Viol 
and  Flute  (1873)  was  a  volume  of  rare  distinction  for  a 
young  man  of  twenty-four.  The  two  poems  named  '  Old 
and  New  '  are  evidence  of  a  fine  faculty  in  the  choice  of 
words,  and  they  have  the  impassioned  emotion  which 
belongs  to  true  poetry.  Of  quite  another  kind  the  pensive 
'  Lying  in  the  Grass  '  is  a  beautiful  nature  poem.  The 


14  POETRY  [PART  i 

New  Poems  (1879)  and  Firdausi  in  Exile  (1885)  also  con- 
tain many  poems  delightful  in  charm  of  technique  and 
thought.  But  the  best  of  his  books  is  In  Russet  and  Silver 
(1894),  which  is  none  the  worse  for  the  frank  introduction 
of  a  note  of  middle  age.  The  title-poem  of  the  volume, 
'  Revelation,'  and  '  Chattafin  '  are  pieces  which  will  bear 
re-reading  and  lingering  upon.  And  if  The  Autumn  Garden 
(1908)  shows  some  falling  off  it  contains  a  few  poems  of 
nearly  equal  beauty  with  these. 

Mr.  Gosse  does  not  make  for  anything  new  or  original, 
but  his  verse  takes  a  worthy  place  in  English  poetry 
written  in  the  second  half  of  the  last  century.  And,  further, 
his  poems  are  interesting  as  a  reflection  of  a  period  in 
modern  literature,  for  he  is  receptive  and  sensitive  to 
influences.  If  the  poems  make  for  nothing  in  themselves 
they  are  an  admirable  commentary,  and  a  commentary 
worth  reading  apart  from  the  text. 

Alfred  Austin  set  up  as  a  model  the  poetry  of  Byron, 
but  his  thin  talent  and  practical  temper  bore  no  resem- 
blance to  the  impetuous  genius  of  the 
Wilfrid  Scawen  author  of  Don  Juan,  and  he  was  least 
Blunt,  b.  1840.  faulty  when  his  standard  was  least  in 
mind.  In  the  poetry  of  Mr.  Wilfrid 
Scawen  Blunt  there  is,  on  the  other  hand,  much  that 
reminds  us  of  Byron,  and  with  Byron's  faults  he  does 
succeed  in  combining  some  part  of  what  is  best  in  Byron's 
vitality,  cynicism,  and  worldly,  devil-may-care  manner. 
Griselda :  a  Society  Novel  in  Rhymed  Verse  (1893),  although 
thrown  into  heroic  measure,  would  hardly  have  been 
written  had  not  Don  Juan  set  the  pattern ;  and  it  has 
sufficient  wit  and  effective  satire,  combined  with  a  fluent 
carelessness  in  versifying,  to  carry  the  reader  on  his  way. 
In  The  Wind  and  the  Whirlwind  (1883)  and  Satan  Absolved  : 
A  Mystery  (1899)  Mr.  Blunt  writes  in  rhetorical  verse  to 
denounce  the  selfish  and  cruel  imperialism  of  the  English, 
— a  burden  of  prophecy  which  always  lies  heavily  upon 
him.  His  experience  when  serving  as  a  young  man  in  the 
diplomatic  service  taught  him  to  be  on  the  side  of  the 
little  and  downtrodden  peoples  ;  and  his  advocacy  of 
Irish  freedom  involved  him  in  a  short  period  of  imprison- 
ment, an  incident  celebrated  in  the  verses  of  In  Vinculis 
(1889). 


CHAP,  i]         POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  15 

A  good  selection  of  Mr.  Blunt' s  poetry  was  made  in 
1898  by  W.  E.  Henley  and  George  Wyndham.  Since  that 
date  he  has  written  Satan  Absolved  and  the  translations  of 
the  Seven  Golden  Odes  of  Pagan  Arabia  (1903) ;  but,  con- 
sidered only  as  a  poet,  Mr.  Blunt  is  at  his  best  in  the 
early  Love  Sonnets  of  Proteus  (1880).  These  sonnets  are 
rough,  irregular,  carelessly  framed.  Mr.  Blunt  does  not 
merely  neglect,  he  defies  the  canons  of  rhyme,  and  nearly 
every  sonnet  contains  surprising  transgressions.  '  Chance  ' 
rhymes  to  '  hands,'  '  death  '  to  '  path,'  '  alas  '  to  '  face,' 
and  '  lace  '  rhymes  both  to  '  dress  '  and  '  sash.'  These 
crudities  are  indefensible  ;  harsh  j  anglings  do  not  make 
for  vigour,  but  in  Mr.  Blunt' s  case  they  are  due  neither  to 
ignorance  nor  carelessness,  and  after  we  recover  from  our 
first  surprise  it  is  possible  without  serious  qualms  to  take 
pleasure  in  the  directness  and  force  of  these  rough  sonnets. 
In  all  his  poetry  Mr.  Blunt  writes  as  one  for  whom  life 
and  action  are  more  than  art.  He  is  a  traveller  and  a  man 
of  the  world  who  has  taken  to  the  writing  of  verse  because 
he  enjoys  it  and  has  a  true  gift  of  utterance.  And  the 
thing  said  is  of  far  greater  importance  to  him  than  the 
manner  of  saying  it.  He  is  the  brilliant  amateur  writing 
to  exercise  and  delight  himself,  but  no  more  than  the 
amateur. 

Since  the  eighteenth  century  the  number  of  women 
writers  in  verse  has  multiplied  fast,  and  the  minor  poetesses 
tend  rapidly  in  our  day  to  exceed  calculation.  Never- 
theless, Christina  Rossetti,  the  one  English  poetess  of 
indubitable  genius,  has  left  no  successor ;  Mrs.  Browning's 
poetry  is  being  lost  in  the  perspective  of  time,  and  in 
recent  years  only  a  few  women  writers  have  betrayed 
clear  and  individual  originality.  But  among  poetesses  still 
living  who  began  to  write  many  years  ago  must  be  named 
Mrs.  Alice  Meynell  and  Mrs.  Margaret  Louisa  Woods. 

As  long  ago  as  1875  Mrs.  Meynell  (then  Miss  Thompson) 

published  her  Preludes,  and,  although  she  failed  to  attract 

general  notice,  she  won  from  Ruskin  the 

Alice  Meynel],     eulogium  that  some  of  the  passages  in  this 

b.  1850.  volume  contained  the  finest  things  he  had 

seen  in  modern  verse.    The  greater  number 

of  the  pieces  in  Preludes  was  afterwards  reprinted  with 

changes  and  alterations  in  company  with  later  work  in 


16  POETRY  [PART  i 

Poems  (1893).  Mrs.  Meynell's  thought  is  slight,  and, 
although  she  is  never  verbose,  these  short  poems  cannot 
always  carry  their  length,  and  might  in  some  cases  be 
bettered  by  the  excision  of  stanzas.  A  beautiful  simplicity 
is  her  greatest  charm.  She  never  tortures  language  nor 
seeks  the  inevitable  and  improbable  word ;  and  her 
diction  is  never  subservient  to  the  exigencies  of  rhyme. 
Nor,  again,  is  she  an  experimentalist  in  metres  and  forms  ; 
her  lyrical  measures  are  the  simplest ;  she  never  frames 
anything  more  elaborate  than  the  sonnet.  And  if  her 
sonnets  have  received  more  than  their  meed  of  eulogy, 
a  few,  and  notably  the  well-known  '  Renouncement,' 
may  compare  with  those  of  Christina  Rossetti,  than  whom 
no  woman  has  written  more  perfectly  in  the  sonnet  form. 
The  simple  melody  of  Mrs.  Meynell's  poems  is  often 
truly  delightful — pensive  with  slight  pauses  in  the  rhythm 
that  enhance  the  music.  '  In  Early  Spring  '  is  a  good 
example  of  her  work  as  a  poet  of  nature,  and  in  '  Parted  ' 
we  have  a  tender  poem  of  regret,  which  again  reminds 
us  of  Christina  Rossetti,  although  the  fourth  stanza — 

"  Although  my  life  is  left  so  dina, 
The  morning  crowns  the  mountain-rim  ; 
Joy  is  not  gone  from  summer  skies, 
Nor  innocence  from  children's  eyes, 
And  all  these  things  are  part  of  him"- 

has  a  note  of  simple  and  human  optimism  alien  to  the 
religious  mysticism  of  Christina  Rossetti. 

Mrs.  Meynell  has  written  little.  Eight  years  after  Poems 
she  published  a  thin  volume  of  Later  Poems  (1901),  which 
is  not  wanting  in  the  limpidity  and  simple  charm  of  the 
earlier  collection,  although  hardly  anything  matched  the 
best  she  had  written  already.  In  1913  her  poems  were 
collected  with  a  few  additions. 

Mrs.  Meynell's  verse  is  graceful  and  tender  rather  than 
thoughtful  or  strong,  but  within  her  range  she  never  fails 
of  clearness,  and  she  never,  even  in  poems  of  love  and 
devotion,  becomes  sentimental.  The  same  sincerity, 
simplicity,  clear  and  restrained  thinking  are  carried  over 
into  her  two  volumes  of  misceilaneous  essays,  The  Rhythm 
of  Life  (1893)  and  The  Colour  of  Life  (1896).  These  are 
poetic  essays,  almost  prose-poems,  on  things  in  general. 


CHAP,  i]         POETS  OF  THE  TRANSITION  17 

The  thought  again  is  clear  and  definite,  but  the  essays 
hold  us  by  a  charm  of  personal  manner  rather  than  by 
any  freshness  or  originality  in  ideas. 

Mrs.  Woods  began  to  write  poetry  before  the  period  of 
this  book,  and  she  has  continued  to  write  since,  but  slowly 

and  at  infrequent  intervals.  The  col- 
Margaret  Louisa  lected  volume  of  1907,  containing  the 
Woods,  b.  1856.  greater  part  of  her  best  work,  is  well 

under  two  hundred  pages  of  loose  print, 
and  the  collection  of  1914  adds  but  a  few  new  poems. 
Nevertheless,  slight  as  is  the  quantity  of  her  work,  her 
name  cannot  be  passed  over  in  speaking  of  the  few  poets 
who  fall  into  that  debatable  region  of  time  belonging 
neither  wholly  to  Victorian  influences  nor  to  the  spirit 
of  the  'nineties.  In  some  respects,  if  we  judge  Mrs.  Woods 
by  her  novels,  by  the  two  racy  and  vigorous  peasant 
poems,  '  The  May  Morning  and  the  Old  Man  '  and  '  Marl- 
borough  Fair,'  or  by  the  tragedy  in  rough  and  common  life 
of  that  fine  poetic  drama,  Wild  Justice  (1896),  we  might 
be  led  to  count  her  with  the  realists.  But,  apart  from  the 
last-named  writing,  which  contains  passages  of  splendid 
and  truly  dramatic  blank-verse,  she  shows  little  tendency 
in  her  poetry  to  realistic  statement  of  the  present.  Her 
work  is  distinguished  rather  by  gravity  and  a  masculine 
strength  of  thought.  Further,  there  is  little  marked  differ- 
ence between  the  earlier  and  the  later  volumes  in  the  temper 
and  character  of  her  writing.  The  '  Gaudeamus  Igitur  ' 
of  the  Lyrics  (1888)  is  a  strong  and  thoughtful  poem,  suf- 
ficient to  lend  distinction  to  any  volume.  The  title-poem 
of  A&romancy  (1896)  is  a  grave  and  pensive  elegy  on 
Oxford  written  in  good  and  well-handled  terza-rima.  In 
Poems  New  and  Old  (1907)  the  only  piece  that  arrests 
attention,  standing  out  from  the  earlier  pieces  there 
collected,  is  the  noble  ode  upon  England's  dead  and  the — 

"  New  thoughts,  new  regions,  unattempted  things  " 

left  as  an  inheritance  to  the  living  generations  of  the 
English.  Mrs.  Woods  has  written  no  greater  poetry  than 
this  splendid  and  inspiring  ode.  In  the  Collected  Poems 
(1914)  she  added  the  profound  and  strong  unrhymed  ode, 
'  High  Tide  on  Victoria  Embankment,'  which  suffers  only 
from  passing  lapses  into  rhetoric  incidental  to  this  form. 


18  POETRY  [PART  i 

together  with  '  Marlborough  Fair  '  and  a  few  new  and 
beautiful  songs  and  lyrics. 

Small  in  quantity  though  her  work  may  be  Mrs.  Woods 
is  not  to  be  dismissed  with  the  hundreds  of  minor  poetasters 
who  write  little  because  they  can  no  more.  She  has  no 
largess  of  facility  nor  any  peculiar  charm  in  the  use  of 
metre,  but  she  has  melody,  her  vision  of  life  is  genuinely 
poetical,  her  thought  is  always  strong  and  individual, 
and  she  has  a  wonderful  versatility,  including  in  her 
range,  and  in  each  case  with  success,  drama,  ode,  dialect 
poem,  elegy,  ballad,  lyric  and  tender  conceit. 

There  are  other  poets  who  began  to  write  within  the 
central  decades  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  continued 
to  write  to  its  close  or  the  early  years  of  this  century. 
But  the  chronological  standard,  mechanically  applied, 
tends  only  to  confusion.  Sir  Lewis  Morris  (1833-1907), 
famous  as  the  author  of  the  Epic  of  Hades  (1876-77),  was 
still  writing  poetry  in  the  twentieth  century,  but  he 
belonged  to  another  age.  Sir  Edwin  Arnold's  (1832-94) 
Light  of  Asia  appeared  in  1879  and  its  characteristic 
facility  without  distinction  clung  to  all  his  later  work. 
Robert  Buchanan  (1841-1901)  wrote  The  Book  of  Orm 
in  1870,  and  all  that  is  of  account  in  his  work  was  finished 
before  the  century  was  drawing  to  an  end.  And  the 
poetry  of  Lord  de  Tabley  (1835-95),  George  Meredith 
(1828-1909),  Frederick  Myers  (1843-1901)  and  T.  E. 
Brown  (1830-97)  belongs  to  the  story  of  Victorian  litera- 
ture. The  work  which  has  been  briefly  summarised  in 
this  chapter  belongs  to  writers  who  cannot  easily  be 
dissociated  from  a  period  of  human  life  which  is  of  the 
past  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  from  the  opening  years 
of  the  tvrentieth  century,  writers  who  can  neither  be 
neglected  nor  regarded  as  literary  landmarks. 


CHAPTER  II 

NEW    FORCES    IN    POETRY 

J5 1.  Arthur  Symons — John  Davidson — W.  E.  Henley — Rudyard  Kipling. 
§  2.  Sir    William    Watson — Ernest    Dowson — William    Sharp — Francis 
Thompson. 

§1 

IN  an  introductory  chapter  some  attempt  has  been  made 
to  summarise  and  distinguish  four  phases  in  literary  ideals 
which  emerge  and  become  clearly  visible  about  ten  years 
before  the  close  of  the  last  century.  The  arbitrary 
division  of  writers  by  schools  is  always  to  be  deprecated 
if  the  dividing  line  be  exaggerated  into  a  partition  wall. 
And  this  is  more  especially  a  mistake  in  an  age  when 
ideas  are  more  rapidly  diffused  throughout  the  civilised 
world  than  at  any  other  time.  In  days  of  slow  com- 
munication and  difficult  travelling  schools  of  painters, 
working  almost  independently  of  each  other,  might  be 
found  in  Italy,  Germany,  Holland  and  Spain  ;  but  for 
centuries  Europe  had  been  in  its  use  of  Latin  a  single 
commonwealth  of  letters,  and  though  later  the  adoption 
of  vulgar  tongues  divided  writers  by  nations,  ideas,  more 
volatile  than  technique,  could  not  readily  be  imprisoned. 
If  ordinary  readers  in  each  country  are  separated  from 
each  other,  in  the  craft  of  literature  men  tend  to  become 
at  one,  for  language  is  a  vesture  not  the  fetters  of  thought. 
And  if  we  narrow  our  purview  to  a  single  country  and 
time  the  difficulty  in  clear  demarcation  between  writers 
is  proportionately  increased.  The  movement  of  influences, 
the  coming  and  going  of  ideas,  are  not  always  outwardly 
traceable,  and  the  contemporary  as  often  as  not  conflicts 
with  the  permanent  importance  of  the  writer. 

The  purpose  of  roads,  however,  is  twofold, — that  they 
bring  us  to  our  destination,  and,  often  of  more  significance, 

19 


20  POETRY  [PART  i 

that  they  give  us  the  pleasure  of  our  journey  by  the  way. 
And  the  cutting  of  tracks  through  the  study  of  history, 
art  or  literature  has  no  other  meaning.  The  dusty  surface 
of  the  road  has  no  beauty  in  itself,  and  only  the  sullen 
and  insensible  traveller  walks  with  eyes  unraised  ;  the 
true  wayfarer  sees  not  the  road,  but  the  encompassing 
beauty  of  earth  and  sky.  In  travelling  part  of  our  road 
across  new  country  we  passed  through  the  sometimes 
attractive  but  not  arresting  scenery  of  Wilde's  poetry. 
At  the  same  stage  or  a  little  later  we  come  upon  five 
names  in  a  poetry  standing  distinctively  for  new  and 
individual  influences  upon  the  time.  As  Oscar  Wilde 
typified  a  first  phase,  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  and  John 
Davidson  characteristically  typify  a  second,  and  W.  E. 
Henley  and  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  a  third.  Mr.  W-  B. 
Yeats,  who  has  been  named  as  typical  of  a  fourth  aspect 
of  literary  revival  in  these  years  must  find  his  place  with 
other  Irish  poets  of  our  time. 

The  poems  of  Mr.  Symons'  first  volume,  Days  and  Nights 
(1889),  are  but  slight  things.    The  melancholy  of  intellec- 
tual rather  than  emotional  sadness  charac- 
Artliur  Symons,  terises  each  poem.     He  writes  chiefly  with 
b.  1865.  his  mind,  but  his  verse  is  less  intellectual  - 

ised  in  the  process  than  is  common  when 
poetry  is  wrought  out  in  this  fashion.  The  intellectual 
poet  is  often  dry,  Mr.  Symons  scarcely  ever.  If  music  be 
the  most  emotional  of  the  arts,  poetry  is  the  outcome  of 
jar  between  emotion  and  intellect,  each  of  these  elements 
of  our  nature  striving  for  the  mastery.  Intellect  and 
emotion  at  one  and  in  complete  harmony  make  for  con- 
tentment and  unproductiveness  ;  their  unresting  conflict 
produces  the  highest  of  the  arts — poetry.  Where  intellect 
masters  the  emotions  we  have  the  clear  light  of  weaker 
passages  in  Matthew  Arnold  or  Sir  William  Watson ; 
where  emotion  alone  rules  we  have  the  effervescence  of 
American  poetesses  and  their  imitators.  From  the  dis- 
satisfaction of  intellect  and  emotion  emerges  poetry. 

Mr.  Symons'  strongest  quality  is  a  subtle  intellectual 
power,  but  his  poetry  is  never  parched  by  intellect.  The 
first  volume,  if  it  holds  little  of  great  merit,  if  it  is  often 
a  little  weak,  gives  evidence  of  the  man  born  with  the 
gift  of  letters  and  a  mind  attuned  to  poetry  ;  and  it 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  21 

shows,  furthermore,  and  this  is  no  small  gift  in  the  poet, 
the  power  of  close  and  accurate  observation.  It  contains 
chiefly  poems  on  things  and  incidents  observed  and 
intellectually  considered.  And  Mr.  Symons  is  thus  saved 
from  falling  into  the  slough  of  that  decadence  which  was 
in  the  air  when  his  earliest  volume  of  verse  appeared, 
although  poems  like  '  Satiety,'  '  The  Opium-Smoker ' 
and  '  Night  and  Wind,'  the  last  perhaps  the  finest 
poem  in  the  volume,  are  tinged  with  the  spirit  of  the 
decadents. 

Silhouettes  (1892)  does  not  differ  markedly  from  its 
predecessor  save  that  it  shows  an  advance  in  technical 
power,  and  the  artifical  world  of  streets,  casinos,  stage- 
doors  and  theatre-stalls,  of  which  Mr.  Symons  continually 
writes,  is  more  in  evidence.  The  poems  on  that  banal 
seaport  Dieppe  are  interesting  as  a  piece  of  history.  Here 
the  makers  of  the  Yellow  Book  and  Savoy  used  to  gather 
for  their  summer  holidays  and  enjoy  the  place  with  childish 
glee  and  all  the  sense  of  novelty  in  situation  of  which  the 
schoolgirl  is  conscious  on  her  first  visit  abroad.  In 
Silhouettes  the  strongest  influence  traceable  is  that  of 
Browning — the  poems  are  cast  largely  in  the  form  of 
dramatic  monologue.  The  contents  of  the  volume  are 
hardly  of  sufficient  individuality,  they  are  the  work  of 
the  imitative  youth  who  exercises  himself  in  the  form 
Browning  and  Tennyson  so  largely  used. 

Reference  has  been  made  to  the  artificial  setting  of 
these  earlier  poems.  It  is  true  the  second  volume  con- 
tains poems  descriptive  of  nature  unspoiled  by  man,  the 
common  sights  of  earth  and  sky.  But  Mr.  Symons  is  not 
at  his  best  here  :  he  writes  as  a  score  or  two  of  his  con- 
temporaries might  have  written.  London  Nights  (1895) 
has,  as  the  title  would  lead  us  to  expect,  less  of  nature 
and  more  of  man,  and  contains  some  of  the  poet's  best 
things  in  this  kind.  Here  also  are  many  voluptuous  poems 
of  the  dreamer,  who  lives  in  the  world  of  the  mind  and 
writes  with  ecstasy  of  sensuous  pleasures,  making  of 
these  more  than  the  gods  have  made  them  to  be.  One 
of  these  poems  of  transient  love  closes  on  a  note  of  half- 
wistful,  half-cynical  regret,  and  a  few  lines  may  be 
quoted  as  typical  of  the  dreamy  intellectualism  of  Mr. 
Symons. 


22  POETRY  [PART  i 

"  What  shall  it  profit  me  to  know 
Your  heart  holds  many  a  Romeo  ? 
Why  should  I  grieve,  though  I  forget 
How  many  another  Juliet  ? 
Let  us  be  glad  to  have  forgot 
That  roses  fade  and  loves  are  not, 
As  dreams,  immortal,  though  they  seem 
Almost  as  real  as  a  dream." 

(Stella  Marts.) 

Many  of  these  poems  are  in  English  what  Baudelaire  and 
Verlaine  are  in  French,  and  the  influence  of  Baudelaire  is 
manifest  throughout.  Like  Verlaine,  the  mystic  and  the 
sensualist  are  mingled  in  Mr.  Symons,  and  like  Verlaine, 
who  could  teach  in  schools  and  lecture  and  even  think 
of  farming,  Mr.  Symons  is  not  without  a  certain  practical 
sense  which  emerges  from  time  to  time.  And,  to  name 
another  characteristic,  the  impressionistic  painting  of 
lights,  faces  and  passing  scenes  has  scarcely  ever  been 
better  and  more  deftly  done  in  verse.  Take  as  an  example 
the  poem  entitled  '  At  the  Stage-door.' 

"  Under  the  archway  sheer, 

Sudden  and  black  as  a  hole  in  the  placarded  wall, 
Faces  flicker  and  veer, 

Wavering  out  of  the  darkness  into  the  light, 
Wavering  back  into  night ; 
Under  the  archway,  suddenly  seen,  the  curls 
And  thin,  bright  faces  of  girls, 
Roving  eyes,  and  smiling  lips,  and  the  glance 
Seeking,  finding  perchance, 

Here  at  the  edge  of  the  pavement,  there  by  the  wall, 
One  face,  out  of  them  all." 

Mr.  Symons  has  not  the  delicate  charm  of  Dowson,  but 
he  is  a  greater  poet.  Yet  the  third  of  his  volumes  does 
not  entirely  fulfil  the  promise  of  the  second.  It  is  a  better 
book,  the  young  poet  has  more  to  say,  and  he  says  it 
better,  but  lasting  poetry  cannot  be  made  out  of  the 
artificial  and  lime-lit  pleasures  of  a  sophisticated  world, 
and  Mr.  Symons  was  too  much  caught  in  the  net  of  these 
things.  The  poems  are  works  of  the  night,  written  in  an 
atmosphere  laden  with  the  blue  smoke  of  cigarettes  and 
heavy  with  the  odour  of  perfumes.  And  the  rhythm 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  23 

often  does  not  suffice  to  hold  the  ear  ;  there  is  an  absence 
of  range  and  variation  in  tone. 

Amoris  Victima  (1897)  opens  with  a  series  of  fourteen 
line  poems,  not  sonnets,  which  narrate  a  story  of  broken 
love.  The  series  was  probably  suggested  by  Meredith's 
Modern  Love.  Other  series  of  poems  in  varying  metres, 
entitled  '  Amoris  Exsul,'  '  Amor  Triumphans  '  and  '  Mundi 
Victima  '  follow.  These  are  the  poems  of  an  older  man  ; 
the  voluptuous  pieces  of  the  earlier  volumes  disappear  ; 
Mr.  Symons  still  writes  of  love,  unrest  and  passion,  but 
with  greater  restraint ;  the  traces  of  care  and  diligence 
in  composition  are  obvious.  The  note  of  love's  regrets 
and  disillusions  harped  in  the  minor  key  wearies,  and 
this  is  one  of  the  least  arresting  of  Mr.  Symons'  volumes 
in  verse.  In  Images  of  Good  and  Evil  (1899)  he  reverts 
to  his  better  manner,  and,  although  the  volume  as  a  whole 
is  possibly  not  so  characteristic  of  the  author,  its  poetry 
is  on  a  far  higher  level  than  most  of  his  work,  dealing 
with  the  essential  things  and  not  with  the  pirouettings 
and  flaring  lights  of  the  music-halls.  And  in  not  a  few 
of  the  poems,  notably  in  the  beautiful  cadences  of  '  Palm 
Sunday  :  Naples,'  the  handling  of  metre  is  more  sure. 
'  The  Old  Women  '  is  a  poem  he  has  scarcely  rivalled  else- 
where, and  in  '  The  Dance  of  the  Daughters  of  Herodias  ' 
we  have  the  finest  achievement  of  Mr.  Symons  in  the 
realm  of  pure  poetry  for  poetry's  sake.  The  poem  is 
written  in  rough  blank  verse,  and  closes — 

"  Dance  in  the  desolate  air, 
Dance  always,  daughters  of  Herodias, 
With  your  eternal,  white,  unfaltering  feet, 
But  dance,  I  pray  you,  so  that  I  from  far 
May  hear  you  dancing  fainter  than  the  drift 
Of  the  last  petals  falling  from  the  rose." 

This  collection  contains  also  the  fine  '  Wanderer's  Song,' 
which  is  not  the  less  attractive  because  the  sentiments 
— the  love  of  Whitmanesque  open-air  wandering — are 
hardly  within  the  intimate  experience  of  the  author. 

Scarcely  anything  written  later  than  Images  of  Good 
and  Evil  calls  for  special  remark.  A  Book  of  Twenty 
Songs  (1905)  contains  slight  lyrics  in  irregular  and  varied 
metres  ;  The  Fool  of  the  World  and  other  Poems  (1906), 


24  13OETRY  [PART  i 

contains  some  work  of  a  higher  order,  but  it  is  not  a 
volume  of  any  distinction,  and  in  the  more  sedate  poet 
it  is  often  difficult  to  recognise  the  author  of  London 
Nights  ;  Knave  of  Hearts  (1913)  contains  a  miscellaneous 
collection  of  short  poems  and  translations  (chiefly  from 
Verlaine),  written  between  the  years  1894  and  1908,  and 
adds  nothing  of  significance  to  his  work,  representing 
chiefly  verse  the  author  scarcely  thought  worth  the 
printing  in  volume  form  at  an  earlier  date. 

Mr.  Symons'  poetry  is  rarely  wanting  in  substance. 
On  a  first  reading  this  may  not  always  be  realised,  but 
closer  examination  will  show  that  he  is  always  thoughtful, 
observant  and  in  touch  with  living  human  beings.  If 
Dowson's  poetry  is  the  poetry  of  sentiment  and  mood, 
Symons'  is  the  poetry  of  sights,  sounds,  people  studied — 
the  opium-smoker,  the  absinthe-drinker,  the  theatre,  a 
woman  of  the  pavements.  Mr.  Symons  is  a  romanticist, 
but  a  romanticist  with  the  gifts  of  the  realist,  he  sees 
clearly  and  observes  accurately.  His  most  characteristic 
work  is  to  be  found  in  London  Nights  and  his  finest  poetry 
in  Images  of  Good  and  Evil :  and  these  two  volumes  show 
him  as  the  poet  sensitively  critical  of  his  own  work.  The 
critical  and  introspective  element  is  one  of  the  chief 
limitations  of  Mr.  Symons'  poetry.  Erotic  and  sensuous 
as  many  of  his  poems  appear,  the  poet  is  never  rapt  in 
the  passion  of  the  moment ;  his  poems  of  fleshly  love  do 
not  suggest  the  overpowering  impulse,  but  an  imaginative 
re-creation  by  the  poet  of  what  might,  ought  (or  perhaps 
ought  not)  to  have  been.  And  indeed  Mr.  Symons  has 
confessed  that  these  are  renderings  of  moments  imagined 
rather  than  of  passions  experienced,  for  the  poet  never 
surrenders  himself  to  his  sensations.  The  sensation  is 
enjoyed  not  in  the  experience,  but  in  the  mood  of  analysis. 
In  these  poems  there  are  always  two  personalities,  the 
psychological  pathologist  and  that  other  self  at  whom  he 
is  looking.  The  most  constant  characteristic  of  Mr. 
Symons'  poetry  is  its  intense  and  often  morbid  psychology 
and  melancholy.  Nevertheless,  this  habit  of  introspection, 
the  attitude  of  the  critic,  render  Mr.  Symons'  poems 
among  the  most  subtle  and  exquisite  written  within  the 
last  few  decades,  although  his  is  a  poetry  never  likely  to 
commend  itself  to  the  English  temper. 


CHAI>.  H]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  25 

John  Davidson  has  this  in  common  with  Mr.  Symons, 
that  he  began  by  refusing  imaginative  idylls  to  write  of 

the  common  sights  and  sounds  of  the 
John  Davidson,  everyday  world  in  which  he  lived.  In 
1857-1909.  other  respects  he  departs  widely  from  Mr. 

Symons.  In  his  passionate  love  of  strength 
he  compares  with  W.  E.  Henley  ;  and  in  the  loud  declama- 
tions of  his  materialistic  philosophy  he  stands  very  much 
by  himself.  His  poetry  is  sombre,  his  life  was  a  tragedy. 
Endowed  like  Carlyle,  a  greater  Scotchman,  and  like 
Henley,  an  English  contemporary,  with  a  crude  admira- 
tion of  power,  he  failed  in  character  because  he  suffered 
abnormally  from  that  defect  of  many  Scotch  minds — a 
credulous  belief  in  facts.  Like  Carlyle  he  was  a  protagonist 
of  the  actual,  for  in  boyhood  he  had  been  trained  in  the 
strictest  sect  of  the  Calvinists,  and  like  Carlyle  he  spent 
half  his  life  buffeting  the  universe  as  a  Calvinist  with- 
out dogma.  He  was,  as  Mr.  Filson  Young  observes, 
haunted  by  the  shadows  of  Predestination,  Election  and 
Justification.  Doctrines  he  had  lost,  but  a  violent  asser- 
tiveness  of  temper  remained  with  him,  and  at  the  last, 
soured  and  embittered  with  poverty  and  ill-health,  he 
flung  defiance  in  the  face  of  the  powers  who  created  the 
universe,  announcing,  "  I  begin  definitely  ...  to  destroy 
this  unfit  world  and  make  it  over  again  in  my  own  image." 
But  even  in  the  twentieth  century  Prometheus  lay  bound, 
the  powers  of  the  universe  were  too  strong  for  Davidson, 
and  he  relinquished  in  suicide  the  superhuman  task  of 
carving  out  the  world  afresh  in  a  form  nearer  to  his  heart's 
desire.  For  Davidson,  though  a  man  of  genius,  was  unwise 
and  never  discovered  himself  and  the  tasks  to  which  he 
was  best  fitted.  Nevertheless,  in  the  perspective  of  time, 
his  name  begins  already  to  emerge  as  one  of  the  strongest 
and  most  original  influences  in  contemporary  English 
poetry.  In  sheer  force  of  personality  nobody  will  compare 
with  him.  His  poetry  represents  unshrinking  fidelity  to 
life  and  actuality,  and  in  a  blundering  way  it  is  a  reaction 
from  the  romantic  sentiments  of  the  Victorians  toward 
a  classical  spirit.  But  Davidson  does  not  exhibit  his 
classicism  in  the  love  of  form  for  its  own  sake  ;  his  poetry 
is  couched  in  the  simplest  metres,  and  these  he  uses  in  a 
rough  and  ready  manner,  far  more  engaged  with  the 


26  POETRY  [PART  I 

saying  of  what  lies  in  him  than  the  exact  form  in  which 
he  states  it. 

His  early  career  was  chequered.  John  Davidson  was 
born  at  Barrhead  in  Renfrewshire,  and  at  thirteen,  his 
school  days  over,  he  entered  the  chemical  laboratory  of 
a  business  house  in  Greenock,  and  in  1871  became  assistant 
to  the  town  analyst.  Between  1872  and  1890,  when  he 
came  up  to  London,  he  taught  in  schools  or  worked  as  a 
clerk  for  his  livelihood.  During  this  time  he  wrote  a 
number  of  early  dramas,  marked  with  many  passages  of 
fine  lyric  poetry,  but  wholly  without  dramatic  possibility. 
Of  these  the  most  brilliant  is  the  fantasia,  Scaramouch  in 
Naxos  (1889).  In  London  he  tried  to  earn  his  living  by 
journalism  and  the  writing  of  novels.  Of  his  novels  the 
best  is  the  witty  and  humorous  Perfervid  (1890),  which 
has  fallen  into  unjustifiable  neglect. 

But  poetry  was  his  true  means  of  expression.  The  volume 
entitled  In  a  Music  Hall  and  other  Poems  (1891)  aims  at 
a  direct  and  realistic  painting  of  ordinary  life  in  verse. 
**  The  statement  of  the  present  and  the  creation  of  the 
future  are  the  very  body  and  soul  of  poetry,"  Davidson 
once  declared.  In  a  Music  Hall  is  a  statement  of  the 
present,  but  Davidson  had  not  yet  found  an  individual 
mode  of  expression,  and  the  poems  of  this  volume  are 
flat  and  lifeless.  He  found  his  voice  with  Fleet  Street 
Eclogues  (Two  series,  1893-96).  The  idea  was  original, 
the  writing  strong.  Humanity,  realism,  imagination 
belong  to  these  easy-going  dialogue  poems.  The  beautiful 
and  tender  '  Christmas  Eve  '  of  the  first  series  is  strangely 
unlike  the  violently  angry  John  Davidson  of  the  Testa- 
ments. His  descriptive  powers  and  his  use  of  words  in 
these  Eclogues  show  him  to  be  a  poet  of  the  divine  calling. 
His  style  is  simple,  plain  and  unadorned,  but  for  force, 
cumulative  power  and  pictorial  effect  Davidson  outstrips 
in  passage  after  passage  others  who  use  a  larger  and  more 
ornate  vocabulary. 

Ballads  and  Songs  (1894)  was  his  most  popular  book, 
and  fully  deserved  to  be.  In  pure  poetry  it  stands  for 
the  high-water  mark  of  Davidson's  achievement.  It  con- 
tained the  splendid  '  Ballad  of  a  Nun  '  and  '  Ballad  of 
Heaven,'  in  which  the  force  of  his  simplicity  in  style  is 
carried  to  its  highest  point  in  ordinary  ballad  measure. 


CHAP.  11]         NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  27 

Almost  every  stanza  has  that  intensity  of  emotion  which 
is  the  soul  of  poetry.  The  lines — 

"  Sometimes  it  was  a  wandering  wind, 

Sometimes  the  fragrance  of  the  pine, 
Sometimes  the  thought  how  others  sinned, 
That  turned  her  sweet  blood  into  wine." 

have  been  quoted  times  without  number,  and  they  never 
lose  with  repetition.  In  the  same  volume  came  '  Thirty 
Bob  a  Week  '  which  would  never  have  been  written  save 
for  Mr.  Kipling,  but  it  has  Davidson's  stronger  moral 
earnestness.  And  '  A  Cinque  Port,'  though  short,  is,  as 
a  rounded  and  complete  work  of  art,  one  of  the  most 
perfect  poems  Davidson  ever  wrote.  It  is  pensive,  grave, 
severe,  yet  beautiful.  The  New  Ballads  (1897)  contained 
work  nearly  as  good  in  the  '  Ballad  of  a  Workman  '  and 
in  that  splendidly  imaginative  poem,  '  A  New  Ballad  of 
Tannhauser,'  which  is,  fortunately,  not  ruined  by  the 
didactic  aim  the  poet  professes  of  laying  the  ghost  "  that 
still  haunts  the  world — the  idea  of  the  inherent  impurity 
of  nature," — a  purpose  most  readers  would  never  divine 
without  the  help  of  the  explanatory  note.  The  title 
poem  of  The  Last  Ballad  (1899)  is  more  impersonal  and 
less  declamatory  than  Davidson  at  his  worst,  but  neither 
it  nor  the  long  '  Ordeal '  can  be  counted  among  his  suc- 
cesses. Nor  do  Holiday  and  other  Poems  (1906)  and  Fleet 
Street  and  other  Poems  (1909)  add  anything  of  value  to 
the  earlier  work.  In  the  last-named  miscellaneous  collec- 
tion the  most  striking  poems  are  '  Liverpool  Street 
Station,'  perhaps  the  best  example  of  Davidson's  use 
of  poetry  to  state  the  present,  and  '  Cain,'  which  was 
intended  to  be  the  first  of  a  series  of  five  poems  to  be 
entitled  '  When  God  meant  God.' 

Most  of  the  poems  in  these  volumes  are  in  rhyme,  but 
Davidson  had  long  been  practising  blank  verse,  and  in 
his  later  years  he  wrote  a  series  of  Testaments  beginning 
with  The  Testament  of  a  Vivisector  (1901)  and  culminating 
with  The  Testament  of  John  Davidson  (1908).  The  last 
Testament  was  prefaced  by  a  violent  and  unbalanced 
'  Dedication  '  to  the  peers  temporal  of  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland,  in  which  with  the  sound  of  a  tempest  Davidson 
set  forth  his  view  of  Christianity  as  the  seed  of  decadence, 


28  POETRY  [PART  I 

and  rounded  off  his  address  with  a  statement,  afterwards 
repeated  in  Fleet  Street,  that  Man  is  "  the  very  form  and 
substance  of  the  universe  .  .  .  become  conscious  and  self- 
conscious."  He  disclaimed  the  name  of  philosopher,  nor 
did  he  admit  allegiance  to  Nietzsche,  who,  according  to 
Davidson,  conceived  the  image  of  the  Overman  only 
because  he  came  himself  of  inferior  stock.  "  Such  an 
idea  would  never  occur  to  an  Englishman.  The  English- 
man is  the  Overman."  Nevertheless,  although  he  thrusts 
Nietzsche  contemptuously  aside,  Davidson  preaches  a 
gospel  of  aristocratic  and  material  power  which  is  scarcely 
distinguishable  from  Nietzschean  theory.  It  is  difficult 
to  take  the  Testaments  seriously — the  poet  of  rare  and 
beautiful  genius  has  sunk  into  declamatory  spasms  of 
denunciation  uttered  in  rhetorical  blank  verse.  The 
Testaments  and  the  two  parts  of  Mammon  (1907-8),  a 
trilogy  incomplete  at  Davidson's  death,  are  of  interest 
as  human  documents,  but  as  poetry,  or  as  a  philosophy 
of  the  universe,  they  are  almost  negligible.  His  war  with 
the  Olympian  powers  is  like  a  buffeting  of  the  air  in  a 
rage  because  the  things  you  wish  to  smite  are  not  at  hand. 
The  vaticinatory  mouthings  of  The  Testament  of  John 
Davidson  are  fortunately  interrupted  by  passages  of  irrele- 
vant poetry  which  gladden  the  reader's  way,  and  at  the 
close  it  is  a  relief  to  turn  the  page  and  reach  the  epilogue 
which  is  worth  the  whole  Testament  and  much  more. 

"  I  felt  the  world  a-spinning  on  its  nave, 

I  felt  it  sheering  blindly  round  the  sun  ; 
I  felt  the  time  had  come  to  find  a  grave  : 

I  knew  it  in  my  heart  my  days  were  done. 
1  took  my  staff'  in  my  hand  ;  I  took  the  road 
And  wandered  out  to  seek  my  last  abode. 
Hearts  of  gold  and  hearts  of  lead, 
Sing  it  yet  in  sun  and  rain, 
'  Heel  and  toe  from  dawn  to  dusk, 
Round  the  world  and  home  again.'  " 

Davidson,  like  Tennyson,  was  a  poet  of  science  :  in 
Mammon  and  the  Testaments  he  exalted  the  dignity  and 
purity  of  matter,  he  chanted  the  psalm  of  the  evolutionary 
processes,  whereby  Nature  has,  at  last,  made  herself  self- 
conscious  in  Man.  He  never  wearied  of  repeating  the 
doctrine  that  Man  is  but  the  Universe  grown  conscious. 


CHAP,  ii]         NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  29 

The  glory  of  Man  is  that  he  quits  himself  boldly  and  is 
strong,  living  out  his  life  to  the  fulness  in  opposition  to  the 
decadent  altruism  of  Christianity.  Thus  Davidson  sub- 
stituted for  the  forsaken  dogmas  of  Calvinism  dogmas  of 
his  own,  as  triumphant,  ungraceful  and  unyielding.  His 
later  poetry  is  the  voice  of  one  crying  in  the  wilderness 
exhorting  man  to  forbear  from  repentance,  to  be  his  own 
god  and  kingdom  of  heaven.  Nevertheless,  he  constantly 
declared  that  he  came  not  to  supply  a  new  metaphysic 
or  philosophy.  "It  is  a  new  poetry  I  begin,  a  new 
cosmogony,  a  new  habitation  for  the  imagination  of  men." 
And  by  a  new  poetry  Davidson  meant  of  poetry  that  it 
should  be  a  crescive  art,  a  statement  of  the  present  and 
of  the  future,  that  it  should  be  a  poetry  not  of  pleasant 
glades,  of  nightingales,  of  fair  women  seated  like  pensive 
goddesses  in  bowers,  but  a  poetry  of  Fleet  Street,  of 
railway  stations,  of  the  factory,  of  the  applications  of 
science  ;  and,  so  far,  Davidson  may  be  regarded  as  the 
English  precursor  of  Marinetti  and  the  continental  poets 
of  Futurism.  As  the  Futurist  painter  attempts  to 
convey  in  pigment  motion  and  the  combined  emotions  of 
artist  and  spectator,  so  Davidson  attempted  to  convey  in 
poetry  the  cosmic  emotion  conscious  of  itself  in  individual 
men.  This  was  the  end  of  his  Testaments  and  tragedies — 
especially  of  The  Theatrocrat  (1905). 

In  later  years  he  found  the  ornament  of  rhyme  a 
limitation  too  narrow  to  admit  the  declamatory  announce- 
ment of  this  cosmic  emotion.  In  a  note  appended  to 
Holiday  and  other  Poems  he  writes  of  a  poetry  which  is, 
"  the  will  to  live  and  the  will  to  power,"  a  poetry  which 
has  found  its  greatest  expression  for  all  time  in  English 
blank  verse,  "  the  subtlest,  most  powerful,  and  most 
various  organ  of  utterance  articulate  faculty  has  pro- 
duced." In  the  writing  of  blank  verse  he  found  the  greatest 
satisfaction  and  joy  of  his  hard  and  embittered  life. 
Davidson's  note  '  On  Poetry  '  is  often  incoherent,  but  it 
is  a  stirring  piece  of  writing,  for  hardly  another  poet  has 
declared  his  faith  in  accents  so  rapt  and  believing  as  his. 
Yet  it  cannot  be  maintained  that  his  blank  verse  is  of 
the  finest  order.  Rhetoric  is  the  bane  of  blank  verse, 
and  it  caught  Davidson  in  its  toils.  There  are  passages, 
and  not  a  few,  wherein  he  rises  to  writing  as  flexible. 


80  POETRY  [PART  i 

melodious  and  strong  as  anything  in  modern  poetry,  but 
against  these  we  have  to  set  hundreds  of  lines  of  bombast 
and  declamation. 

Despite  his  love  for  the  art  of  blank  verse  Davidson  will 
be  remembered  by  a  few  rhyming  ballads,  eclogues  and 
short  lyrics.  And  if  we  judge  him  only  by  this  narrow 
selection  from  his  work  he  must  be  placed  in  a  small 
group  with  poets  as  dissimilar  as  Mr.  Arthur  Symons, 
Mr.  Thomas  Hardy  and  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  who  have 
produced  something  beyond  the  range  of  their  contem- 
poraries, a  poetry  that  leaves  nothing  quite  as  it  was 
before. 

In  his  faith  in  a  material  world,  in  his  admiration  of 
strength  and  courage,  in  a  tendency  to  lapse  into  declama- 

„  tion,  William  Ernest  Henley  is  sometimes 

William  Ernest  ,.,      ,^     . ,  T\     -j       »     u     u.u 

not  unlike  Davidson.     Davidson  s  health 

was  Poor'  at  tne  ^ast  ^e  was  naunted  with 
the  belief  that  he  was  a  victim  of  cancer, 
and  it  is  always  to  be  remembered  that  Henley  was  an 
invalid.  His  physical  disabilities  go  far  to  explain  his 
writing. 

Henley  was  educated  at  the  Crypt  Grammar  School  of 
Gloucester,  and  grew  up  under  the  influence  of  T.  E. 
Brown  who  became  head  master  in  1861.  From  boyhood 
he  suffered  from  tuberculous  disease,  which  finally 
necessitated  the  amputation  of  a  foot,  and  his  '  Hospital 
Verses  '  are  the  record  of  a  period  when  he  lay  in  the 
infirmary  at  Edinburgh.  These  verses,  as  might  be 
expected,  were  rejected  by  every  editor  to  whom  they 
were  submitted.  They  were  published  in  1888  as  part 
of  the  Book  of  Verses.  His  other  chief  volumes  of  verse, 
written  in  the  intervals  of  driven  journalistic  work,  were 
The  Song  of  the  Sword  (1892),  which  contained  the  '  London 
Voluntaries  '  and  was  re-christened  by  that  name  in  a 
second  edition,  Hawthorn  and  Lavender  (1899),  and  For 
England's  Sake  (1900). 

The  volume  of  1888  brought  Henley  some  recognition 
in  England  and  perhaps  more  immediate  fame  in  America. 
The  best  of  its  contents  were  '  In  Hospital '  and  the 
'  Bric-a-brac  '  poems.  The  interest  of  '  In  Hospital '  for 
us  is  the  personality  of  Henley  rather  than  these  rough- 
hewn  and  unrhymed  verses.  And,  beyond  this,  their 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  31 

highest  merit  is  their  realistic  rendering  of  the  atmosphere 
of  the  sick- ward,  the  operating  theatre,  the  silent  figures  of 
nurse,  student  and  house  surgeon  coming  and  going. 
The  tense  stillness  broken  by  stertorous  moans,  the  smell 
of  anaesthetics  and  drugs,  the  footfalls  in  the  night  and 
whispered  consultations  of  nurses,  these  are  all  repro- 
duced with  astonishing  fidelity.  In  the  illusion  of  reality 
Henley  achieves  complete  success.  In  the  words  of  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons,  "  Here  is  poetry  made  out  of  personal 
sensations,  poetry  which  is  half  physiological,  poetry 
which  is  pathology — and  yet  essentially  poetry."  Judged 
as  poetry  the  finest  of  these  pieces  is  the  last — '  Dis- 
charged.' In  this  there  is  something  of  a  finer  inspira- 
tion which  Henley  did  not  often  reach.  And  typical  of 
this  collection  are  those  poems  which  sketch  individuals 
—the  staff -nurse,  the  lady  probationer,  the  house-surgeon, 
the  scrubber,  and  best  of  all,  the  well-known  '  Apparition  ' 
with  its  portrait  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

In  mastery  of  metre  and  in  beauty  of  imagery  the 
important  contents  of  Henley's  second  volume  are  the 
'  London  Voluntaries.'  The  easy  movement  and  loose 
rhyming  arrangement  of  these  poems  give  them  a  peculiar 
flexibility  and  admirably  adapt  them  to  the  purpose  of 
describing  London  in  her  moods.  And  in  felicity  of 
thought,  epithet  and  phrase  Henley  is  at  his  best.  When 
he  writes  that  though  a  hundred  years  hence  other  lovers 
will  be  where  we  are  now, 

"  But  being  dead,  we  shall  not  grieve  to  die/' 

he  expresses  an  old  thought  with  a  simplicity  and  directne  s 
which  gives  to  it  new  life.  And  among  memorable  epithets 
and  descriptive  phrases  we  have  the  river  "  new-mailed  in 
morning,"  the  "  golden-coasted  sky  "  of  evening,  the  wind 
"  slouching,  sullen  and  obscene  "  along  the  streets.  The 
'  London  Voluntaries  '  probably  cost  Henley  more  pains 
to  produce  than  any  other  part  of  his  writing.  Hawthorn 
and  Lavender,  upon  the  other  hand,  is  not  a  book  in  which 
we  find  him  at  his  best.  These  poems  of  the  south  coast, 
of  Sussex  Downs  and  lanes,  too  strongly  suggest  the  over- 
worked journalist  spending  a  well-earned  holiday,  sur- 
prised at  his  leisure  and  hardly  knowing  how  to  use  it 
save  in  a  rollicking  tramp  along  the  roads,  improvising 


82  POETRY  [PART  i 

scattered  staves  of  song  upon  flowers  and  winds  and 
clouds.  It  is  all  a  little  boisterous  and  violent,  disturbing 
the  silence.  He  shouts — 

"  Sound,  Sea  of  England,  sound  and  shine, 

Blow,  English  Wind,  amain, 
Till  in  this  old,  gray  heart  of  mine 
The  Spring  need  wake  again." 

A  few  songs  like  this  have  their  use  after  reading  Tennyson 
and  the  languid— 

"  Heavily  hangs  the  broad  sun-flower, 
Heavily  hangs  the  tiger-lily," — 

but  the  collection  of  some  seventy  pages  makes  us  regret 
our  evening  walk  with  a  companion  whose  voice  is  so 
strident,  who  is  so  obviously  out  to  enjoy  himself.  The 
poems  too  strongly  suggest  the  man  resolved  to  persuade 
himself  he  is  enjoying  life,  and  his  conception  of  a  good 
time  is  typically  Anglo-Saxon — something  a  little  noisy. 
And  so  Henley  finds  it  in  him  to  write  of  autumn's 
"  exquisite  chromatics  of  decay,"  a  phrase  which  suggests 
nothing  so  much  as  the  oily  discolourations  of  a  noisome 
pool.  But  sometimes  he  redeems  himself  and  shows  that 
his  violence  was  largely  an  affectation  by  which  he  deceived 
himself  into  forgetting  that  his  life  was  one  of  pain  and 
hard  struggle.  The  poems  beginning  '  Look  down,  dear 
eyes,  look  down  '  and  '  Come  where  my  Lady  lies  '  are  of 
another  order.  In  these  we  are  nearer  to  the  innermost 
mind  of  Henley  than  in  any  part  of  the  two  preceding 
volumes. 

For  England's  Sake  (1900)  was  his  contribution  to  the 
outbreak  of  patriotic  poetry  excited  by  the  Boer  War, 
and  it  was  but  natural  that  Henley  with  his  faith  in  the 
material  event  should  have  written  as  he  did.  These 
poems,  however,  add  nothing  to  his  reputation  ;  for  the 
patriotic  song,  like  the  church  hymnary,  appeals  to  an 
instinct  other  than  the  faculty  of  poetry.  With  the 
exception  of — 

"  What  have  I  done  for  you, 
England,  my  England?  " 

Henley's  last  volume  is  not  much  above  the  range  of  good 
journalistic  verse-writing. 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  33 

The  finer  breath  of  poetry  did  not  lie  within  the  borders 
of  Henley's  genius.  He  is  a  singer  who  only  transposes  his 
key  by  an  accident ;  his  common  method  is  to  sing  of 
himself  and  his  daring,  passionate  enjoyment  of  life.  But 
Kingsley,  Henley,  Stevenson  protest  too  loudly  the  joy  of 
life  to  convince  us  that  they  found  it  easy  to  be  happy  ; 
too  often  they  speak  like  men  attempting  to  persuade 
themselves  against  their  better  judgment.  Henley  praises 
the  generous  gods  for  life,  like  the  preacher  who  doubts 
that  his  congregation  follow  his  doctrine,  and,  scarcely 
sure  of  it  himself,  he  falls  back  upon  his  "  unconquerable 
soul,"  for  which  again,  and  unnecessarily,  he  thanks  the 
gods.  He  is  a  better  poet,  and,  it  may  be  added,  a  wiser 
man,  when  he  is  less  defiant. 

"  Shall  we  not  take  the  ebb  who  had  the  flow  ? 
Life  was  our  friend.     Now,  if  it  be  our  foe — 
Dear,  though  it  spoil  and  break  us  ! — need  we  care 
What  is  to  come  ?  " 

"  Let  the  great  winds  their  worst  and  wildest  blow, 
Or  the  gold  weather  round  us  mellow  slow  : 
We  have  fulfilled  ourselves,  and  we  can  dare 
And  we  can  conquer,  though  we  may  not  share 
In  the  rich  quiet  of  the  afterglow 

What  is  to  come." 

That  is  Henley  at  his  best  in  mood,  wisdom  and  poetry. 

Henley's  finest  gift  was  an  ear  for  the  melody  of  words, 
and  in  this  he  was  not  unerring,  nor  did  he  always  strive 
for  perfection.  Many  of  his  Ballades,  Vilanelles,  and  the 
irregular  rhythms  of  '  London  Voluntaries  '  give  pleasure 
for  their  deftness  and  happy  choice  of  words.  Nor  could 
anything  in  the  mere  technique  of  some  of  the  short 
'  Bric-a-brac  '  poems  be  bettered.  The  double  ballade  of 
4  Life  and  Fate  '  has  the  note  of  Villon  ;  "  While  the  west 
is  paling"  is  an  exquisite  snatch  of  song  caught  from  the 
slight  stir  of  the  evening  air.  Yet  the  poet  in  Henley 
never  sinks  beneath  the  craftsman.  As  a  poet,  however, 
his  range  is  narrow  ;  his  imaginative  powers  are  of  the 
simplest ;  he  frequently  repeats  his  ideas  and  images  ; 
and,  often  as  he  sounded  the  trumpet  calling  to  life, 
he  had  few  ideas  about  living  beyond  the  need  of  love 
and  courage  to  endure.  For  Henley's  chronic  invalidism 


34  POETRY  [PART  i 

shaped  his  ideas  and  poetry.  '  In  Hospital '  is  more  than 
a  story  of  the  poet's  days  in  the  Edinburgh  infirmary — 
it  is  the  picture  of  a  soul.  Like  Scott  and  Stevenson  he 
was  incapacitated  for  the  active  life  to  which  he  was 
born  by  temperament,  and  therefore  the  more  was  he 
lured  on  by  the  "  bright  eyes  of  danger."  The  hospital 
verses  are  a  story  of  adventure  in  the  surgeon's  den, 
'  Bric-a-brac,'  '  Echoes,'  '  Rhymes  and  Rhythms,'  poems 
of  his  soul's  adventures  in  a  world  of  pain  shot  with 
gleams  of  love  and  happiness.  '  A  Song  of  Speed  '  chants 
the  novel  adventure  of  riding  in  a  motor-car.  Like  his 
friend  Stevenson,  Henley  is  the  child  lost  in  the  fair 

"  Dreaming,  desiring,  possessing," 

and  trying  bravely  to  laugh  away  weariness  and  fear. 

Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling's  early  verse,  like  much  of 
Henley's,  was  merely  part  of  his  work  as  a  journalist 
and  editor.  Like  Henley  he  grows  noisy 
Rudyard  Kipling,  in  his  glorification  of  physical  courage 
b.  1865.  and  the  prowess  of  the  English,  and,  at 

the  worst,  his  patriotism  sinks  beneath 
Henley's  into  an  "  underbred  swagger  and  brawling 
imperialism."  Yet  Mr.  Kipling,  conscious  of  the  English 
race  far-flung  over  the  surface  of  the  earth,  has  the 
foundations  of  his  imperialistic  gospel  deeply-seated. 
He  has  not  been  guiltless  of  foolish  noise,  but  he  is  not  the 
writer  of  empty  jingo  ditties  :  for,  born  in  India,  he  has 
travelled  widely  throughout  the  English-speaking  world, 
and  his  mind  is  strongly  imbued  with  a  consciousness  of 
the  group-soul  of  the  race  to  which  he  belongs.  The 
British  Empire  is  not  only  a  physical  fact  to  Mr.  Kipling, 
it  is  a  psychic  phenomenon  and  a  natural  religion.  And 
he  is  more  typically  English  than  Henley,  the  pagan, 
for  he  accepts  the  gods  of  his  country  and  the  doctrines 
of  Old  Testament  Christianity. 

Mr.  Kipling's  connection  with  India  in  early  manhood 
has  everything  to  do  with  the  cast  of  his  thought  and  the 
character  of  his  writing,  whether  in  prose  or  verse.  He 
returned  to  India,  when  his  school  days  were  over,  and 
formed  a  connection  with  the  editorial  staffs  of  the  Lahore 
Civil  and  Military  Gazette  (1882-87)  and  the  Allahabad 
Pioneer  (1887-89) ;  and  to  these  papers  he  contributed 


CHAP,  n]         NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  35 

satirical  verse,  sketches  and  short  stories  of  Indian  life. 
And  although  he  has  written  of  every  corner  of  the  earth 
the  best  of  his  work,  especially  in  prose,  is  that  set  with 
an  Indian  background.  Yet  the  light  verse  of  Depart- 
mental Ditties  (1886)  has  an  interest  too  restricted  to 
make  any  wide  appeal.  They  may  still  be  read  by  the 
Anglo-Indian,  and  they  are  sometimes  slightly  amusing 
to  his  brother  in  England,  but  the  humour  is  of  the 
character  named  "  family,"  and  at  a  distance  loses  its 
point.  As  satirical  verse  these  ditties  take  no  high  place  : 
Mr.  Kipling  is  out-distanced  by  at  least  a  dozen  men  in 
the  last  half-century  from  Thackeray  to  Sir  Owen  Sea- 
man, and  he  shows  no  special  faculty  in  one  grace  of  this 
kind  of  writing — extravagances  of  metre  and  rhyme. 

Before  the  publication  of  Barrack-room  Ballads  (1892) 
snatches  of  verse  under  that  name  appeared  as  epigraphs 
to  some  of  Mr.  Kipling's  tales  ;  later  Henley  printed 
many  of  the  ballads  in  the  National  Observer,  and  in  due 
course  they  appeared  in  volume  form  to  meet  with  an 
instantaneous  and  phenomenal  popularity  hardly  equalled 
since  Scott,  Byron,  Tupper  and  Montgomery.  Barrack- 
room  Ballads  was  divided  into  two  parts,  and,  as  Mr. 
Richard  le  Gallienne  pointed  out  twenty  years  ago,  whereas 
there  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  success  of  the  swinging  ballads 
in  soldier  dialect  (better  handled  here  than  in  the  Mulvaney 
stories)  the  '  Other  Verses  '  are  comparatively  dull  and 
uninspired.  The  artifice  of  Macaulay's  verse  is  too  trans- 
parent and  obvious  to  charm  us  a  second  time,  and  '  With 
Scindia  to  Delhi,'  '  The  King's  Mercy,'  and  even  the  oft- 
praised  '  Ballad  of  East  and  West,'  although  they  do  not 
lack  vigour,  only  serve  to  remind  us  how  much  better 
Macaulay  did  these  things.  The  whole  of  this  section  is 
wanting  in  the  personality  of  the  author  and  in  genuine 
poetry  ;  and  pieces  like  '  An  Imperial  Rescript '  and  '  The 
Ballad  of  Boh  da  Thone '  are  almost  stupidly  weak. 
'  L' Envoi,'  which  closes  the  section,  alone  has  the  breath 
of  true  poetry  and  is  worthy  of  better  precursors.  Very 
different  is  it  with  the  twenty  poems  of  '  Barrack-room 
Ballads.'  The  matter  is  unequal,  but  only  one  or  two 
need  be  set  aside.  '  Snarleyow  '  with  its  repulsive  goriness 
is  a  poem  that  ought  never  to  have  been  written.  Its 
theme  may  be  true  :  but  of  some  subjects,  if  we  must 


36  POETRY  [PART  i 

speak,  we  speak  in  whispers  for  the  sake  of  our  common 
humanity.  The  blundering  falseness  of  thought  and 
sentiment  in  '  Soldier,  Soldier  '  is  a  discredit  to  the  author. 
But  four  swinging  and  racy  ballads  in  soldier  dialect, 
'  Fuzzy- Wuzzy,'  '  Gunga-Din,'  '  Oonts  '  and  '  Mandalay,' 
are  almost  a  new  kind  of  poetry,  and  scarcely  below  them 
come  '  Ford  o'  Kabul  River  '  and  '  The  Young  British 
Soldier.'  '  Fuzzy-Wuzzy,'  with  its  lolloping  refrain,  is 
perhaps  no  great  achievement,  but  an  individual  one, 
and  offers  a  good  example  of  Mr.  Kipling's  swing. 

"  So  'ere's  to  you,  Fuzzy-Wuzzy,  at  your  home  in  the  Soudan ; 
You're  a  pore  benighted  'eathen  but  a  first-class  fightin'  man ; 
An'  'ere's  to  you,  Fuzzy-Wuzzy,  with  your  'ay rick  head  of  'air — 
You  big  black  boundin'  beggar — for  you  broke  a  British  square  !  " 

'  Mandalay,,'  is  by  far  the  finest  poem  in  the  collection. 
The  slow  rhythmical  rise  and  fall  of  the  lines  reminds  us 
of  the  pathetic  tenseness  of  plain-song  chant,  and  the 
poet  has  wonderfully  transfigured  common  thoughts  and 
common  words.  It  is  the  crystallisation  into  poetry  of 
a  mood  in  the  vulgar  mind  of  a  cockney,  who  has  never 
seen  the  Orient  so  clearly  as  when  away  and  at  a  distance. 
Were  we  to  question  everything  else  Mr.  Kipling  has 
written,  '  Mandalay  '  ranks  him  with  the  poets.  In  the 
poetry  of  commonplace  thought  nothing  could  surpass 
this — 

"  'Er  petticoat  was  yallar  an'  'er  little  cap  was  green, 
An'  'er  name  was  Sapi-yaw-lat — jes'  the  same  as  Theebaw's  Queen, 
An'  I  seed  her  first  a-smokin'  of  a  whackin'  white  cheeroot, 
An'  a-wasting  Christian  kisses  on  an'  'eathen  idol's  foot : 

Bloomin'  idol  made  o'  mud — 

Wot  they  call  the  Great  God  Budd— 

Plucky  lot  she  cared  for  idols  when  I  kissed  'er  where  she  stud  ! 

On  the  road  to  Mandalay, 

Where  the  flying-fishes  play, 

And  the  dawn  comes  up  like  thunder 

Out  o'  China  'cross  the  bay." 

The  defects  of  all  these  poems  are  those  which  inhere 
in  all  Mr.  Kipling's  work — crudity  of  sentiment,  bluster, 
loud  shouting,  and  an  inability  to  resist  the  temptation 
to  garish  effects.  But,  if  we  are  content  not  to  expect 
the  note  of  finer  poetry,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  in  their 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  87 

genre  the  Barrack-room  Ballads  are  an  achievement.  They 
and  their  successors  in  the  later  volumes  have  probably 
been  imitated  by  budding  poets  more  often  than  any 
modern  verse.  And  the  fact  that  Mr.  Kipling  can  be 
imitated,  so  that  the  copy  is  scarcely  distinguishable 
from  the  original,  is  a  measure  of  his  quality. 

The  Seven  Seas  (1896),  beside  the  poems  which  give  a 
title  to  the  volume,  contain  a  further  selection  of '  Barrack- 
room  Ballads,'  including  the  truly  beautiful  '  Mary,  Pity 
Women,'  that  splendid  song  of  reiselust,  '  For  to  Admire.' 
and  more  ballads  with  the  rollicking  swing  of  the  earlier 
collection — '  Cholera  Camp,'  '  The  'Eathen  '  and  '  The 
Shut-eye  Sentry.'  None  of  these  is  quite  as  good  as 
the  best  ballads  of  the  earlier  series,  neither  is  anything 
in  The  Seven  Seas  on  the  same  plane  as  '  Mandalay,'  nor 
anything  as  bad  as  the  worst  things  in  the  first  '  Barrack- 
room  Ballads  '  :  the  level  of  workmanship  is,  in  general, 
better  sustained.  Three  poems  stand  distinctively  before 
the  others — the  two  dramatic  monologues,  '  M' Andrews' 
Hymn  '  and  '  The  Mary  Gloster,'  and  that  stirring  ballad 
'  The  Rhyme  of  the  Three  Sealers,'  which  tells  the  story 
of  a  fight  between  sealing  boats  in  the  cold  fogs  of  the 
North  Pacific.  '  The  Rhyme  of  the  Three  Sealers  '  is  an 
epic  in  ballad  form,  the  ballad  of  the  long  anapaestic  and 
iambic  line,  and  renders  in  poetry  the  thoughts  and  lives 
of  rough  seamen  with  a  vigour  and  truth  which  makes 
the  poem  one  of  Mr.  Kipling's  greatest  pieces  of  writing. 
The  anvil  and  heavy  hammer  attempts  of  Mr.  Masefield 
and  his  imitators  to  get  the  common  thought  of  common 
people  into  verse  is  the  merest  bungling  beside  these  lines, 
in  which  the  rough  sealing  skipper  bids  farewell  to  life 
as  he  lies  wounded  on  the  deck — 

"  He'll  have  no  more  of  the  crawling  sea  that  made  him  suffer  so, 
But  he'll  lie  down  on  the  killing-grounds  where  the  holluschickie 

g°- 

And  west  you'll  sail  and  south  again,  beyond  the  sea-fog's  rim., 
And  tell  the  Yoshiwara  girls  to  burn  a  stick  for  him." 

The  last  line  with  its  naive  revelation  of  the  man's  moral 
standard  is  one  of  those  inspired  flashes  of  character 
drawing  which  Mr.  Kipling  strikes  now  and  again.  The 
first  of  the  dramatic  monologues,  '  M' Andrews'  Hymn,' 


88  POETRY  [PART  i 

reveals  the  character  of  an  old  Scots  engineer  and  is, 
at  the  same  time,  a  song  of  steam  and  machinery.  For 
the  other,  '  The  Mary  Gloster,'  it  may  be  said  that  it 
would  be  impossible,  whether  in  prose  or  verse,  to  find 
elsewhere  in  Mr.  Kipling's  work  a  painting  of  character 
stronger,  more  exact  and  more  convincing  than  this 
drawing  in  his  own  words  of  the  life  and  personality  of 
the  coarse  and  successful  shipowner,  who  lies  on  his  death- 
bed, talking  in  mingled  moods  of  cynicism,  contempt 
and  earnestness  to  his  idle,  luxurious  and  effete  son. 
"  Actuality  "  is  the  word  often  used  of  Mr.  Kipling's  work, 
and  never  with  better  reason  than  of  '  The  Mary  Gloster.' 
In  the  '  Song  of  the  English,'  which  opens  The  Seven 
Seas,  Mr.  Kipling  blows  the  trumpet  of  imperialism 
loudly,  but  without  any  of  the  vulgar  flourishes  with 
which  he  is  often  indiscriminately  credited.  It  would 
be  beside  the  mark  to  pretend  that  he  always  avoids 
shallow  jingoism  ;  for  he  appears  sincerely  to  entertain 
the  belief  that  Englishmen  and  Anglo-Saxon  colonials  are 
better  than  all  foreigners.  In  this  simple  faith  he  wrote 
the  early  soldier  stories  and  the  verse  of  the  Barrack- 
room  Ballads ;  and  in  The  Five  Nations  (1903),  inspired, 
like  Henley,  by  the  Boer  War,  he  assumes  the  mantle  of 
a  prophet  of  empire.  In  justice  to  Mr.  Kipling  it  ought, 
however,  to  be  kept  in  mind  that  his  imperialistic  exhorta- 
tions are  as  often  as  not  as  strongly  denunciatory  of  faith- 
lessness and  the  transgressing  of  the  law  as  are  the  chapters 
of  Isaiah. 

"  Keep  ye  the  Law — be  swift  in  all  obedience — 
Clear  the  land  of  evil,  drive  the  road  and  bridge  the  ford. 
Make  ye  sure  to  each  his  own 
That  he  reap  where  he  hath  sown  ; 

By  the  peace  among  Our  peoples  let  men  know  we  serve  the 
Lord." 

The  famous  gibe  at  "  the  flannelled  fools  at  the  wicket  or 
the  muddied  oafs  at  the  goal  "  is  only  one  of  a  series  of 
ironical  casts  at  the  complacent  superiority  of  the  insular 
mind  ;  the  prosy  slang  of  '  The  Lesson,'  which  drives 
home  the  moral  of  our  discredit  in  South  Africa,  can 
hardly  be  counted  a  eulogy  of  British  efficiency  ;  and 
the  '  Recessional '  of  1897  reads  like  the  admonition  of  a 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  39 

Jeremiah  in  khaki.  The  jingoism  of  Mr.  Kipling  lies  not 
so  much  in  anything  he  writes  as  in  the  magnificent 
assumption  that  Anglo-Saxons  may  make  mistakes,  may 
sin  against  their  Law  and  their  God,  but  at  the  worst  the 
strong  inclination  of  Jehovah  is  to  support  the  English 
whenever  possible.  Our  virtues  are  our  own,  our  follies 
are  such  as 

" the  Gentiles  use 

Or  lesser  breeds  without  the  law." 

The  worship  Mr.  Kipling  pays  in  his  temple  has  been  well 
described  as  "  a  rather  morbid  version  of  Judaism." 

The  volume  of  1903  contains  nothing  that  could  add  to 
Mr.  Kipling's  immediate  popularity  or  enduring  fame. 
In  the  memorial  verses  to  C.  J.  Rhodes  he  reaches  a 
restrained  dignity  which  is  not  frequent  with  him  ;  and 
'  Sussex,'  a  poem  in  praise  of  the  county  he  has  adopted 
for  his  own,  has  a  distinction  in  the  fine  simplicity  of  its 
English.  Even  Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc  has  written  nothing  as 
good  of  his  beloved  county.  '  The  Truce  of  the  Bear,' 
in  which  "  Matun,  the  old  blind  beggar  "  tells  the  story 
of  his  mauling  by  "  Adam-Zad,  the  Bear,"  is  set  apart 
from  the  other  poems  of  the  volume  in  its  mystical  emotion 
and  pathetic  intensity.  The  impulse  to  chant  the  romance 
of  steam,  commerce  and  machinery  appears  in  the  per- 
sonifications of  '  The  Bell  Buoy,'  '  Cruisers  '  and  '  The 
Destroyers.'  But  neither  here,  nor  in  the  '  Service  Songs  ' 
of  the  same  collection,  which  are  dull  and  spiritless,  is 
there  anything  which  reaches  the  level  of  the  best  things 
in  the  earlier  volumes. 

The  Boer  War  had  an  ill  effect  on  art  and  literature  ; 
and  Mr.  Kipling  was  among  those  who  suffered  most — 
nearly  all  his  better  writing  in  verse  antedates  the  war, 
for  since  that  time  he  has  been  too  conscious  of  his  prophetic 
call  to  cry  aloud  and  spare  not.  This  was  the  more  natural 
because  he  has  never  dissociated  poetry  from  journalism, 
and  latterly  his  poems  have  appeared  in  the  newspapers 
like  verse  leaders  on  important  topics  of  the  day.  Mr. 
Kipling  is  the  poet  of  empire,  colonial  expansion  and 
commercial  activity,  as  these  things  were  imagined  and 
believed  by  the  great  mass  of  the  English  at  the  close  of 
the  nineteenth  century  ;  and  he  is  therefore  almost  wholly 


40  POETRY  [PART  i 

a  poet  to  his  contemporaries  ;  nearly  all  his  verse  writing 
is  cramped  by  limitations  of  time  and  place,  and  of  simple 
and  essential  poetry  there  is  less  to  be  found  in  him  than 
might  be  hoped.  A  like  statement  holds  true  of  a  great 
part  of  his  prose  work ;  the  faults  and  the  virtues  are  in 
either  case  the  same,  and  it  will  be  more  possible  to 
estimate  Mr.  Kipling  as  a  whole  in  another  chapter.  As 
a  poet  he  is  emphatically  of  an  age.  His  popularity  and 
his  credit  have  already  waned.  But  in  his  place  he  is 
important  as  a  finger-post  pointing  the  way,  indicative 
of  much  in  a  literary  phase.  And  that  he  has  a  true  but 
limited  genius  as  a  poet  is  manifest,  for  he  was  more 
inspired  when  he  wrote  '  Mandalay,'  '  The  Three  Sealers  ' 
and  '  The  Mary  Gloster  '  than  in  any  part  of  his  prose. 


§2 

The  close  of  the  century  is  not  without  other  names  of 
distinction  among  poets  who  had  either  ceased  to  write 
before  its  last  year  or  had  by  that  time  published  all  that 
is  essential  to  our  knowledge  of  their  work.  If  they  are 
here  set  apart  from  others  named  in  this  chapter  the 
differentiation  implies  not  necessarily  a  lesser  poetic  genius, 
but  an  influence  less  marked  upon  the  impulses  and  ten- 
dencies of  poetry  in  our  own  time.  Although  Sir  William 
Watson,  Ernest  Dowson,  William  Sharp  and  Francis 
Thompson  suffer  little  and  often  gain  in  a  comparison 
with  the  poets  whom  we  have  named  earlier  in  the  chapter, 
they  have  not  in  a  perceptible  degree  directed  any  recent 
trend  in  poetry.  In  '  Wordsworth's  Grave  '  and  '  Lacrimse 
Musarum  '  Sir  William  Watson  has  written  two  noble 
elegies,  but  he  is  in  the  following  of  Milton,  Wordsworth 
and  Matthew  Arnold,  and  only  slightly  a  man  of  his  gen- 
eration ;  the  slender  and  beautiful  lyrical  genius  of  Dowson 
was  not  of  a  nature  to  extend  its  influence  far  ;  Francis 
Thompson  was  a  poet  from  the  world  of  books  and 
Catholic  mysticism  ;  and  William  Sharp  was  the  poet 
of  an  eerie  and  somewhat  affected  Celtic  mysticism.  And 
thus  for  differing  reasons  these  four  illustrate  no  clear 
relation  to  their  time,  save  that  Dowson  belonged  to  the 
group  of  the  Yellow  Book,  and  the  poetry  of  Sharp  is  one 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  4l 

facet  in  the  Celtic  Renaissance.  But  these  two  links  are 
weak  and  of  no  special  moment. 

The  volume  containing  The  Prince's  Quest  (1880) 
appeared  nearly  forty  years  since.  Oddly  enough,  as  it 
is  one  of  Sir  William  Watson's  earliest,  it 
Sir  William  is  also  his  longest  poem.  The  motif  is 

Watson,  b.  1858.  that  underlying  the  Hymn  of  Bardaisan, 
Shelley's  Alastor,  and  many  another  of 
the  world's  poems — the  quest  of  the  soul's  ideal.  It  is  his 
only  poem  which  exhibits  any  vagueness  in  thought  and 
form,  and  is  obviously  inspired  by  Shelley  while  betraying 
echoes  from  Tennyson.  The  metre  employed — five-foot 
iambic  couplets — moves  slowly,  the  poet  is  not  wholly 
at  his  ease  in  it,  and  the  poem  as  a  whole  announces 
its  immaturity.  His  genius  first  found  definite  ex- 
pression four  years  later  in  his  Epigrams  of  Art,  Life 
and  Nature  (1884).  The  terse  and  chiselled  form  of  the 
epigram  was  scarcely  the  favourite  child  of  the  times, 
and  its  revival  by  a  young  poet  showed  at  least  a  courage 
to  stand  aloof  and  work  out  his  own  salvation.  He 
disclaims  all  intention  of  conforming  to  the  popular  con- 
ception of  the  epigram,  and  chooses  rather  to  emulate 
"  the  nobler  sort  of  epigram  "  — that  is,  the  single  thought 
on  art,  life  or' nature,  pointedly  and  concisely  expressed. 
In  this  sense  all  great  poetry  (and  all  great  prose)  will 
contain  epigrams  ;  though  the  epigram  in  itself  can  never 
be  a  high  form  of  the  poetic  art.  But  the  interest  of  Sir 
William  Watson's  venture,  so  far  as  he  is  concerned,  is 
that  it  has  given  to  all  his  subsequent  writing  a  terse 
and  sententious  character. 

The  Prince's  Quest,  and  the  shorter  poems  of  that 
volume,  together  with  the  book  of  Epigrams,  gave  evi- 
dence of  a  genuine  poetical  faculty  combined  with  a  fine 
command  of  reserved  and  dignified  English,  which  it 
was  good  to  see  at  a  time  when  the  tendency  ran,  as 
it  still  does,  to  a  careless  enlargement  of  the  borders  of 
poetical  vocabulary.  The  author's  ideal  of  poetic  form 
and  diction  was  from  the  first  rigidly  exacting.  His  early 
volumes  displayed  a  self-control  and  reserve  remarkable 
in  a  young  man.  But,  as  a  poet  of  wider  reach  and  feeling, 
he  first  showed  the  range  of  his  powers  with  Wordsworth's 
Grave,  written  between  1884  and  1887,  a  poem  which 


42  POETRY  [PART  i 

attracted  universal  admiration  for  its  simple  form  and 
dignity  of  phrase.  The  comparison  with  Milton,  which 
the  poem  suggested  to  more  than  one  critic,  was  some- 
thing more  than  an  overflow  of  contemporary  feeling.  In 
Wordsworth's  Grave  we  find  the  same  intellectual  passion 
for  the  commanding  word  and  phrase  and  the  inevitable 
epithet,  which  belonged  to  Milton  ;  and  the  lines  move 
slowly,  as  to  "  a  solemn  music."  The  manner,  the  diction, 
and  the  music  of  the  poem  are  exactly  fitted  to  the  subject, 
and,  despite  the  contrary  opinion  of  the  few,  in  the  judg- 
ment of  the  majority  of  those  who  read  poetry  at  all  it 
will  remain  as  Sir  William  Watson's  finest  poem. 

In  the  order  of  elegiac  poetry  he  followed  Wordsworth's 
Grave  with  Lacrimce  Musarum  (1892),  written  after 
the  death  of  Tennyson.  This  is  his  most  beautiful, 
warmly-coloured  and  melodious  poem.  The  loose  metre 
of  the  ode,  though  faulty  in  the  first  version,  was  revised 
later  and  given  that  seeming  artlessness  which  is  the 
fruit  of  perfect  art ;  and  imagery  combines  with  thought 
to  sustain  the  poem  on  a  plane  worthy  of  its  theme. 
The  natural  tendency  of  Sir  William  Watson  to  finished 
terseness  and  rounded  completeness  in  short  phrases  dis- 
appears, and  the  falling  music  of  the  lines  flows  across  the 
mind  conveying  the  direct  and  subtle  communication  of 
emotion.  We  do  not  stop,  as  we  are  inclined  to  do  in 
Wordsworth's  Grave,  to  dwell  upon  the  single  thought  or 
isolated  image.  The  opening  passage  of  the  elegy  could 
not  be  bettered,  either  in  the  poetic  imagery  of  its  thought 
or  in  the  fitting  stress  it  lays  upon  the  oneness  of  Tennyson 
and  his  poetry  with  the  racial  consciousness  of  the  land 
to  which  he  belonged.  In  his  other  more  noteworthy 
elegies,  '  In  Laleham  Churchyard  '  and  '  The  Tomb  of 
Burns,'  Sir  William  Watson  returns  to  the  concise  and 
epigrammatic  manner. 

It  is  in  the  elegy,  the  ode  and  the  quasi-philosophical 
poem  that  Sir  William  Watson's  muse  finds  her  fittest 
sphere  of  song  ;  it  is  in  these  that  he  stands  differentiated 
from  other  poets  of  his  time  ;  and  for  this  reason  the 
common  comparison  with  Wordsworth  has  its  meaning, 
although  he  wholly  lacks  Wordsworth's  interest  in  the 
apparently  commonplace.  He  is  not  obsessed  with  a 
belief  in  the  enormous  importance  of  little  things,  but 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  48 

inclines  to  display,  on  the  contrary,  a  manner  which  is 
almost  irritatingly  superior.  General  conceptions  rather 
than  everyday  trifles  appear  in  the  mirror  which  he  holds 
up  to  life.  But  that,  after  a  short  discipleship  to  Shelley, 
Sir  William  Watson  conceived  a  deep  and  lasting  rever- 
ence for  Wordsworth,  it  is  needless  to  say.  The  reason 
is  not  far  to  seek.  If  the  emotion  of  the  pure  lyric  is 
spontaneous  and  unsought,  the  inspiration  of  elegiac 
poetry,  using  the  words  in  their  widest  connotation,  is 
thought  touched  with  emotion.  And  it  is  here  that  he  finds 
a  point  of  contact  with  Wordsworth.  Wordsworth  was  not 
one  for  whom  poetry  was  an  inrush  which  came  to  him 
wholly  unbidden  ;  poetry  was  for  him  "  emotion  recol- 
lected in  tranquillity,"  and  that  is  why  he  was  never  able 
wholly  to  distinguish  between  his  hours  of  inspiration 
and  the  days  when  he  wrote  poetry  as  a  poet  by  profes- 
sion. Sir  William  Watson  knows  that  his  is  not  "  the 
facile  largess  of  a  stintless  muse,"  but 

"  A  fitful  presence  seldom  tarrying  long, 
Capriciously  she  touches  me  to  song." 

The  character  of  the  larger  part  of  his  poetry  is  "  emotion 
recollected  in  tranquillity."  Apart  from  the  elegies,  the 
ode,  the  philosophical  poem  and  the  sonnet,  with  its 
exacting  rules,  are  the  forms  most  naturally  fitted  to  the 
character  of  his  genius.  On  another  plane  we  may  add 
his  political  poetry,  which  can  hardly  have  more  than  an 
ephemeral  interest,  and  his  few  short  satires,  which,  for 
point  and  venom,  can  scarcely  be  surpassed.  Among  his 
finer  odes  are  the  splendidly  sonorous  '  Hymn  to  the  Sea  ' 
and  '  England  my  Mother  '  ;  and  of  his  quasi-philosophical 
poems  the  most  distinctive  are  '  The  Hope  of  the  World  ' 
and  '  The  Unknown  God.'  In  the  two  poems  last  named 
he  appears  as  an  egotistic  rebel,  defying  the  order  of 
the  universe  on  his  own  account.  And  this  is  a  mistake, 
for,  as  Epictetus  pointed  out  long  ago,  it  is  better  for 
a  man  to  confine  himself  to  the  things  which  lie  in  his 
power.  It  is  this  self-centred  attitude  which  hampers 
Sir  William  Watson  as  a  poet.  He  is  not  lyrical  because 
he  cannot  place  himself  in  other  situations  with  a  sub- 
jective and  imaginative  sympathy.  And  this  faculty  lies 
at  the  root  of  all  dramatic  and  lyrical  achievement.  If, 


44  POETRY  [PART  i 

however,  his  genius  does  not  express  itself  naturally  in 
lyric  song,  he  has  written  a  few  short  lyrics  of  supreme 
beauty.  The  following  stanzas,  which  bear  no  title,  form 
a  lyric  poem  with  the  integral  purity  of  clear  crystal — 

"  Thy  voice  from  inmost  dreamland  calls  ; 
The  wastes  of  sleep  thou  makest  fair  ; 
Bright  o'er  the  ridge  of  darkness  falls 
The  cataract  of  thy  hair." 

'•The  morn  renews  its  golden  birth  : 

Thou  with  the  vanquished  night  dost  fade ; 

And  leav'st  the  ponderable  earth 
Less  real  than  thy  shade." 

And  there  are  a  few  other  short  poems  of  a  true  lyrical 
character. 

Sir  William  Watson's  New  Poems  (1909)  cannot  be  said  to 
add'anything  of  real  importance  to  his  earlier  work,  with  the 
exception  of  that  splendid  ode  in  unrhymed  verse,  '  Wales  : 
A  Greeting.'  This  volume  and  the  next  miscellaneous 
collection,  The  Muse  in  Exile  (1913),  came  as  a  disappoint- 
ment. Some  of  the  pieces  in  the  last  volume  hardly  rise 
above  a  better  type  of  light  doggerel,  and  in  longer  poems, 
'  Part  of  my  Story  '  for  example,  he  drops  into  trite  prose. 
In  the  poems  of  the  two  last  collections  the  lines  are 
parched  and  dry  ;  rapture  there  is  hardly  any  ;  emotion 
of  any  kind  is  often  difficult  to  find.  He  has  driven 
his  own  ideal  of  sculptured  and  statuesque  beauty  in 
form  and  diction  to  an  extreme,  and  anything  like  vital 
emotion  has  been  strangled  in  the  birth.  In  tranquillity 
he  has  evidently  found  it  difficult  to  remember  his 
moments  of  emotion. 

The  genius  of  Sir  William  Watson  is  elegiac  rather  than 
lyrical,  and  the  abstracted  emotion  of  his  poetry  has 
prompted  the  comment,  which  often  appears  in  print,  and 
is  no  less  often  heard  from  the  average  reader,  that  he  has 
not  enough  passion  for  a  poet.  This  is  not  only  false  in  it- 
self, but  it  displays  an  extraordinary  ineptness.  It  is  true 
that  poetry  is  in  danger  when  it  loses  touch  with  physical 
life  and  strays  into  the  region  of  things  purely  intellectual ; 
but  the  lyric  of  the  mind  may  be  as  genuinely  moving  and 
real  as  the  lyric  of  human  passion,  hope  or  disillusion. 


CHAP,  ii]         NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  45 

Perhaps  the  finest  lyric  in  our  language,  Milton's  ode  '  On 
Time,'  has  no  single  concrete  idea  on  which  we  can  seize 
— time  is  only  a  convention  of  the  mind — and  the  sphere 
in  which  the  thought  moves  is  wholly  mental ;  yet  few 
poems  are  more  profoundly  moving.  And  to  those  who 
level  at  him  the  accusation  that  his  art  is  cold  Sir  William 
Watson  retorts  that 

"  in  man's  life 

Is  room  for  great  emotions  unbegot 
Of  dalliance  and  embracement,  unbegot 
Ev'n  of  the  purer  nuptials  of  the  soul." 

Among  living  English  poets  he  stands  by  himself  with  a 
collection  of  poetry  which  is  not  closely  comparable  in 
character  with  that  of  any  of  his  contemporaries.  The 
distinctive  position  he  has  won  for  himself  he  owes  to 
the  consistent  faith  with  which  he  has  pursued  a  method, 
style  and  ideal  he  evolved  in  early  youth.  That  style, 
the  return  to  classic  restraint  and  dignity,  was  hardly 
in  the  ascendant  when  he  adopted  it ;  but  he  followed  it 
with  individual  conviction.  He  has  written  slowly,  at 
intervals,  and  with  elaborate  care,  refusing  to  print  a 
line  which  did  not  satisfy  his  own  ideals  of  artistic  form 
and  the  traditions  of  great  poetry.  Only  in  his  later 
volumes  has  his  power  of  self-judgment  completely 
deserted  him.  We  do  not  look  in  his  work  for  colour, 
warmth  and  lyric  passion  ;  for  the  emotion  of  his  poetry 
is  abstract  and  intellectual,  of  the  mind  not  of  the  heart. 
He  belongs  to  no  school  or  coterie  of  his  time,  and  as  a 
poet  remains  isolated. 

Oscar  Wilde  alleged  as  a  law  that  art  cannot  surrender 
its  imaginative  medium  to  life  or  nature  without  losing 

itself,  and  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  propounds 
Ernest  Dowson,  the  same  thesis  in  another  form  when  he 
1867-1900.  asserts  that  art  is  but  an  escape  from 

life — a  means  of  forgetting.  The  poetry 
of  Ernest  Dowson  is  an  illustration  of  the  poet  seeking 
in  his  art  a  door  of  escape  from  sordid  reality.  Gentle, 
sensitive,  wistful,  Dowson  went  out  of  his  way  to  live 
amid  evil  surroundings.  He  took  his  supper  in  cabmen's 
shelters  ;  he  received  by  legacy  an  old  dock  in  the  East 
End,  and  there  he  lived  for  a  time  in  a  crumbling  shed, 


46  POETRY  [PART  i 

drinking  at  night  in  the  squalid  pothouses  of  the  district ; 
in  Paris  he  frequented  the  questionable  purlieus  of  Les 
Halles.  He  was  never  more  at  his  ease  than  in  an  environ- 
ment beneath  him.  His  only  happiness  lay  in  blindness 
to  the  present  moment.  He  loved  with  "  shy  and  eager 
devotion  "  the  daughter  of  a  foreign  restaurant  keeper. 
When  she  disappeared  for  the  evening  his  only  desire  was 
to  kill  another  night  in  drink.  Fortunately  she  married 
the  waiter. 

The  desire  for  drink  was  the  ruin  of  a  rare  and  beautiful 
personality.  Gentle  and  sensitive  when  sober  Dowson 
became  another  man  in  his  cups,  gave  way  to  foul 
and  abusive  language  and  entirely  lost  control  of  him- 
self. 

Physically  fragile,  retiring  and  shy,  without  ambition, 
writing  fastidiously  to  please  himself,  with  hardly  a 
thought  of  that  vulgar  creature,  the  public,  Dowson  never 
lived,  as  ordinary  men  count  living.  But,  although  there 
is  nothing  strong  or  assertive  in  his  three  small  volumes 
of  verse,  once  known  the  impress  does  not  easily  slip 
from  the  memory,  for  there  is  something  of  the  inner 
spirit  of  poetry  in  everything  he  wrote.  Yet  the  content 
is  slight,  the  meaning  negligible.  His  poems  are  pure 
fantasies,  the  reflected  mood  of  a  moment — they  appeal 
by  beauty  of  form,  grace  of  thought  and  felicity  of  music. 
He  quoted  as  his  ideal  a  line  from  Poe — 

"  The  viol,  the  violet  and  the  vine," 

declaring  his  belief  that  "  v  "  was  the  most  beautiful  of 
consonants  and  could  not  be  used  too  often.  A  true 
poetical  inspiration  and  a  critical  fastidiousness  united  to 
give  to  Dowson's  verse  its  peculiar  qualities.  He  never 
mistook  his  limitations.  He  was  not  tempted  to  astonish 
or  write  the  epic.  He  knew  that  to  please,  to  grace  a 
transient  sentiment,  to  paint  beautifully  the  streaks  of 
the  tulip,  could  be  his  only  achievement.  Unhappy 
weaknesses  the  gods  had  showered  upon  him  :  they  did 
not  withhold  the  highest  of  their  gifts — self-knowledge. 
He  made  no  painful  and  tiresome  efforts — the  vice  of  the 
twentieth  century — at  startling  originality,  but  adopted 
with  perfect  naturalness  the  old  and  well-worn  phrases 


CHAP.  11]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  47 

and  images,  recognising  that  what  has  often  been  used  is 
thereby  shown  worthy  of  use  again. 

"  Ah,  Lalage  !  while  life  is  ours, 

Hoard  not  thy  beauty  rose  and  white, 
But  pluck  the  pretty,  fleeting  flowers 
That  deck  our  little  path  of  light." 

The  study  of  Dowson's  poetry  in  chronological  order  is 
disconcerting.  Chronology,  it  has  been  said,  has  nothing 
to  do  with  a  writer's  work.  This  assertion  is  one  of  the 
most  stupid  ever  seriously  made.  Powers  of  intellect 
and  genius  are  not  exempt  from  the  malignity  of  circum- 
stance and  the  ravages  of  time.  There  is  no  better  method 
of  learning  to  know  an  author  than  to  begin  at  the 
beginning  and  read  through  to  the  end.  The  course  of 
his  development  is  thus  seen  like  the  arc  of  a  circle  ; 
we  trace  its  rise  and  fall.  All  that  is  best  in  Dowson, 
indeed  all  that  justifies  his  claim  to  more  than  the  briefest 
notice,  is  contained  in  his  Verses  (1896).  This  was  followed 
by  The  Pierrot  of  a  Minute  (1897),  illustrated  by  Beardsley, 
and  Decorations  (1899).  The  Pierrot  of  a  Minute,  a  one 
act  play  in  dainty  heroic  measure,  has  favour  and  pretti- 
ness,  but  this  slight  sketch  of  the  fantastic  loves  of  a 
moon  maiden  and  a  pierrot  in  the  gardens  of  the  Trianon 
scarcely  calls  for  comment  or  a  second  reading.  Few 
could  have  touched  it  with  the  grace  with  which  Dowson 
adorns  his  theme  ;  but  even  as  a  fantasy  it  fails,  for  it 
has  no  atmosphere.  It  suggests  the  desk  rather  than 
twilight  shadows  in  sheltered  garden  ways.  In  Decorations 
Dowson  repeats  himself  and  falls  much  below  the  level 
of  Verses.  One  poem,  '  Breton  Afternoon,'  must,  how- 
ever, be  singled  out,  both  because  it  does  not  suffer  by 
comparison  with  the  first  volume  and  because  in  its  con- 
cluding lines  we  have  an  apt  commentary  on  the  poet's 
personality. 

"  Mother  of  God,  O  Misericord,  look  down  in  pity  on  us, 
The  weak  and  blind  who  stand  in  our  light  and  wreak  ourselves 
such  ill." 

The  cry  comes  directly  from  Dowson's  heart. 

Dowson  was  a  weak  poet,  unable  to  sustain  his  flight, 
sinking  quickly  after  a  few  short  years  of  poetic  inspira- 


48  POETRY  [PART  i 

tion ;  and  to  read  his  volumes  consecutively  is  to  trace 
not  growth  but  failure  in  power.  His  genius  was  clouded 
by  drink  and  weakness  of  will.  In  view  of  the  very 
restricted  character  of  his  output,  the  briefness  of  his 
period  of  true  inspiration  and  the  slightness  of  thought 
and  imagination  in  his  poetry,  it  may  be  questioned 
whether  by  some  Dowson  has  not  been  ranked  too  high. 
In  like  manner  Coleridge's  period  of  poetic  inspiration 
falls  within  a  few  months,  but  his  work  is  supremely 
great.  Nobody  would  make  a  like  claim  for  Dowson  ; 
perhaps  few  would  give  him  a  distinctive  place  with 
secondary  poets.  On  the  other  hand,  it  may  safely  be 
asserted  that  few  are  likely  to  care  for  Dowson  who  do 
not  care  for  the  finer  breath  of  pure  poetry,  a  poetry 
which  rests  nothing  upon  its  content  and  all  upon  its 
melody,  mood  and  form. 

Dowson  is  an  example  of  the  weakness  of  will  and 
intellect  characteristic  of  some  of  the  French  romantic 
and  symbolist  poets  of  the  last  century.  His  ordinary 
mood  is  a  melancholy,  the  melancholy  of  the  weak  man 
of  scholarly  and  precise  instincts.  All  the  finer  poetry  of 
Verses  is  tinged  with  sadness.  It  is  the  note  of  tender 
regret  for  things  which  may  never  be  again  which  gives 
an  exquisite  beauty  of  sentiment  and  music  to  '  In 
Tempore  Senectutis  '- 

"When  I  am  old, 
And  sadly  steal  apart, 
Into  the  dark  and  cold, 
Friend  of  my  heart ! 
Remember,  if  you  can, 
Not  him  who  lingers,  but  that  other  man, 
Who  loved  and  sang,  and  had  a  beating  heart, — 
When  I  am  old  !  " 

Beautiful  too  in  the  same  mood  is  '  Amantium  Irae,'  and 
in  4  Impenitentia  Ultimge '  Dowson  has  again  given  us 
one  of  those  glimpses  into  his  heart  so  frequent  in  his 
work — 

"  For,  Lord,  I  was  free  of  thy  flowers,  but  I  chose  the  world's 
sad  roses." 

The  one  distinctively  strong  poem  of  the  volume  has  the 
same  note  of  regret  and  disillusion.  In  '  Non  sum  qualis 


CHAP,  n]         NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  49 

eram  bonse  sub  regno  Cynarae '  the  reticence  which 
commonly  marks  Dowson's  verse  is  lost,  and  for  once  he 
writes  with  fire  and  passion.  Nothing  else  in  his  work 
is  quite  like  this.  Only  one  other  poet  living  at  the  time 
could  have  written  thus,  and  only  occasionally  did  Swin- 
burne reach  greater  melody  and  more  powerful  wrords. 

"  I  have  forgot  much,  Cynara  !  gone  with  the  wind, 
Flung  roses,  roses  riotously  with  the  throng, 
Dancing  to  put  thy  pale,  lost  lilies  out  of  mind  ; 
But  I  was  desolate  and  sick  of  an  old  passion. 
Yea,  all  the  time,  because  the  dance  was  long : 
I  have  been  faithful  to  thee,  Cynara !  in  my  fashion." 

Of  the  poets  whose  work  appeared  in  the  Yellow  Book, 
who  won  a  name  at  that  time  or  in  the  later  'nineties,  for 
purity  and  charm  of  poetic  gift,  none,  save  Mr.  Arthur 
Symons,  can  be  compared  to  Dowson.  And  few  have 
achieved  so  much  upon  so  narrow  a  margin  of  imaginative 
and  intellectual  power.  His  opposite  is  to  be  found  in 
John  Davidson,  who  had  imagination  and  strength 
sufficient  to  have  compassed  greater  work  than  any  he 
has  left  behind  him.  The  story  of  Ernest  Dowson  is  the 
tragedy  of  a  nature  too  weak  for  the  circumstances  of 
life,  that  of  Davidson  the  tragedy  of  a  strong  nature 
hampered  by  a  weak  environment. 

The  prose  romances  of  William  Sharp  are  of  greater 
moment  than  his  poetry,  but  in  the  ten  years,  1882-91, 
he  published  in  verse  under  his  own 
William  Sharp,  name  four  volumes,  The  Human  Inherit- 
1855-1905.  ance,  Earth's  Voices,  Romantic  Ballads 

and  Poems  of  Phantasy,  and  the  unrhymed 
poems  in  irregular  metre  entitled  Sospiri  di  Roma.  These 
contain  fluent,  ready,  impressionistic,  not  peculiarly 
original  verse.  A  large  element  of  the  feminine  mingled 
in  Sharp's  nature,  and  in  all  his  work  there  is  that  facility 
and  comparative  neglect  of  perfect  form  characteristic  of 
much  feminine  writing.  In  his  anxiety  not  to  miss  the 
mood  of  the  moment  he  adopts  a  lax  and  over-abundant 
use  of  words,  and  often  fails  to  utter  his  thought.  At  his 
worst  he  becomes  weakly  verbose. 

Nor  do  these  faults  disappear  from  the  single  volume 
of  poetry,  From  the  Hills  of  Dream  (1896),  which  belongs 
to  that  other  side  of  his  life,  when,  as  '  Fiona  Macleod,' 


50  POETRY  [PART  i 

he  became  the  magician  and  seer  of  Celtic  myth,  mys- 
ticism and  superstition.  Neither  by  environment  nor 
training  had  Sharp,  who  belonged  to  the  manufactur- 
ing district  of  Paisley,  the  dreamy  and  mystical  character 
of  the  Celt  imparted  to  him.  But  in  later  life  he  de- 
veloped an  extraordinary  faculty  for  absorbing  the 
eerie,  especially  as  it  found  expression  in  the  lives  and 
speech  of  islanders  off  the  west  coast  of  Scotland.  Even 
so  he  remains,  as  in  his  earlier  work,  superficial.  His 
prose  and  verse,  written  under  the  pseudonym  of  Fiona 
Macleod,  contain  deft  impressionistic  glimpses  of  Celtic 
mysticism,  and  not,  to  state  an  obvious  contrast,  the 
inherent  mysticism  of  a  whole  personality  belonging 
to  A.  E.,  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  and  other  Irish  poets.  For 
he  lived  in  a  dream  of  ideal  beauty  rather  than  in 
an  impulse  of  genuine  spiritual  mysticism.  He  chose 
as  a  maxim  in  life  :  "  To  live  in  beauty — which  is  to 
put  in  four  words  all  the  dream  and  spiritual  effort  of 
the  soul  of  man."  And  From  the  Hills  of  Dream  sought 
to  imprison  in  words  the  transient  gleams  of  beauty, 
of  love,  of  spiritual  emotion,  which  visit  the  mind  to 
fleet  away  in  the  selfsame  moment.  The  result  is  an 
artificial  and  even  level  of  ecstasies.  These  poems  are 
beautiful,  they  are  emotional,  they  have  an  atmosphere 
of  the  unearthly,  but  they  lack  substance  and  diversity. 
Miss  Eva  Gore-Booth  writes,  especially  in  The  One  and 
the  Many,  a  poetry  as  mystical  and  otherworldly  as  Fiona 
Macleod's,  and  a  poetry  with  genuine  thinking  and  true 
content  to  which  Sharp  can  make  no  pretence.  But  if  no 
poetry  can  endure  long  without  matter  as  well  as  large 
utterance,  poetry  may  breathe  and  live  on  lower  levels 
by  virtue  of  beauty  in  imagery  and  expression.  And 
these  virtues  the  prose  poems  and  verse  of  From  the  Hills 
of  Dream  possess  ;  and,  further,  they  have  in  an  extra- 
ordinary degree  what  H.  D.  Traill,  in  speaking  of  Fiona 
Macleod's  work,  well  described  as  "  the  fascination  of 
'  atmosphere.'  '  They  reveal  that  Celtic  and  mystical 
side  of  the  Scotch  nature  which  marked  the  work  of  an 
earlier  and  greater  Scotch  writer,  George  Macdonald 
(1824-1905),  who  died  in  the  same  year  as  William  Sharp. 
Even  in  our  day  there  can  come  out  of  Scotland  other 
things  than  the  kailyard  school  has  painted. 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  51 

Francis  Thompson  was  another  poet  of  mystic  aspira- 
tion who  was  neither  a  great  poet  nor  a  profound  mystic. 
But  in  his  case  we  do  not  feel,  as  with 
Francis  Thompson,  Fiona  Macleod,  that  his  mysticism  is  a 
1860-1907.  cultivated  and  carefully  nurtured  mood 

— it  is  an  integral  element  of  the  poet's 
nature,  though  hardly  an  overpowering  conviction. 

The  order  in  which  Thompson's  poems  were  published 
evidently  does  not  follow  the  order  of  composition,  for 
at  first  he  wrote  poetry  in  poverty  and  destitution,  finding 
no  publisher.  His  father,  who  was  a  doctor,  educated  his 
son  at  Owen's  College,  Manchester,  for  the  practice  of 
medicine  ;  but  Thompson  soon  abandoned  all  thought  of 
a  professional  career  for  poetry  and  opium  in  London. 
Years  of  misery  followed  till  he  was  given  a  home  by 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Wilfrid  Meynell,  who  saw  to  the  publication 
in  1893  of  his  Poems.  Sister  Songs  (1895)  and  New  Poems 
(1897),  which  followed,  contain,  in  general,  greater  poetry 
than  the  first  volume.  There  is  little  need  in  Thompson's 
case,  however,  to  follow  any  chronological  method.  In 
splendour  of  phrase  no  poet  since  Keats  has  rivalled 
Thompson,  and  in  his  verse  there  is  a  reminder  of  the 
cadence  and  regal  grandeur  of  Milton's  prose.  And, 
further,  the  tricks  of  Keats  are  all  here — the  coinage  of 
new  words,  the  use  of  substantives  for  verbs  and  the 
passion  for  the  double  epithet,  which  in  phrases  like 
"  flame-chorded  psalterion  "  and  "  tawny-hided  desert  " 
the  younger  poet  uses  with  splendid  effect.  Too  often, 
however,  he  drops  into  pedantic  and  almost  vulgar 
Latinisms.  The  line — 

"Sublimed  the  illuminous  and  volute  redundance" 

has  become  a  byword  of  ridicule,  and  the  inflated  periods 
of  '  To  Monica  Thought  Dying  '  wholly  fail  to  touch  us. 
Thompson  was  in  his  own  words  the  "  dedicated  amorist  " 
of  beauty,  but  he  was  as  often  the  slave  as  the  lord  of  the 
mistress  whom  he  loved.  In  the  opening  lines  of  '  The 
Hound  of  Heaven  '  we  have  one  of  the  greatest  passages 
of  poetry  written  in  the  last  century  ;  but  Thompson 
soon  ceases  to  be  a  master  of  the  grand  style  and  sinks 
beneath  his  own  redundance.  And  not  infrequently  he 
lapses  into  deplorably  halting  metre.  Yet  he  can  write 


52  POETRY  [PART  i 

simply,  and  it  is  a  pity  he  did  not  more  often  put  aside 
his  mannerisms  to  write  other  poems  like  '  In  No  Strange 
Land,'  '  Ex  Ore  Infantium '  and  '  Daisy.'  Not  even 
Wordsworth  could  write  poetry  more  simple  and  true 
than  Thompson  in  the  last-named  poem. 

"  She  went  her  unremembering  way, 

She  went,  and  left  in  me 
The  pang  of  all  the  partings  gone 
And  partings  yet  to  be. 

"  She  left  me  marvelling  why  my  soul 

Was  sad  that  she  was  glad  ; 
At  all  the  sadness  in  the  sweet, 
The  sweetness  in  the  sad. 


"  Nothing  begins,  and  nothing  ends, 

That  is  not  paid  with  moan  ; 
For  we  are  born  in  other's  pain, 
And  perish  in  our  own." 

In  Francis  Thompson's  coffin  was  laid  with  roses  the 
tribute  of  George  Meredith  to  a  poet  far  removed  in 
character  and  belief  :  "  A  true  poet,  one  of  a  small  band." 
And  if  ever  men  were  born  with  a  high  vocation  to  poetry 
Francis  Thompson  was  of  their  number.  There  have  been 
many  greater  poets,  poets  more  simply  truthful  to  the 
chastity  of  their  art,  poets  more  tuneful,  and  poets  who 
come  home  more  powerfully  to  the  heart  and  imagina- 
tion, but  none  called  to  poetry,  as  to  a  sacred  office  not 
to  be  laid  aside,  in  any  greater  wise  than  Thompson. 
Poetry  was  his  revelation  of  life,  and  for  him,  as  for 
Keats,  poetry  was  an  end  in  itself.  Keats  claimed  that 
poetry  should  be  rounded  and  complete,  leaving  no  sense 
of  dissatisfaction,  and  Francis  Thompson  sought  to  make 
of  poetry  an  art  for  its  own  sake.  Like  Keats,  but  to  an 
excess  the  earlier  poet  never  dreamed  of,  he  loads  every 
rift  with  ore  ;  or  rather  he  weaves  a  web  of  stiff  cloth  of 
gold.  And  the  fault  of  much  of  his  poetry  is  the  fault 
of  his  Essay  on  Shelley  (1908).  The  Essay  is  not  good 
criticism  but  a  marvellous  feat  in  ornate  and  mystical 
diction ;  and  his  poetry  often  collapses  into  a  turgid 
splendour  of  metaphysical  and  Latin  words.  His  most 


CHAP,  n]        NEW  FORCES  IN  POETRY  58 

ambitious  poem,  the  poem  most  distinctive  of  his  gorgeous 
and  ornate  diction,  is  the  famous  '  Hound  of  Heaven.' 
But  after  the  magnificent  opening  the  poet  is  unable  to 
sustain  his  flight,  and  passages  sink  into  little  more  than 
elaborate  acrobatics  in  Latinised  vocabulary.  Thompson 
uses  words,  as  the  maker  of  tapestry  uses  his  threads,  to 
weave  a  beautiful  pattern,  as  the  executant  fingers  notes 
on  the  piano,  making  of  poetry  an  art  confined  within 
the  limits  of  the  pictorial  and  melodious.  And  the  fas- 
cination of  language  blinds  him  almost  as  much  as  it 
did  the  French  symbolists  who  read  words  in  colours. 
Yet,  strangely  enough,  Thompson  was  distinguished 
among  poets  of  his  time  by  his  moral  and  spiritual  exalta- 
tion. The  inspired  fervour  of  the  religious  mystic  illumines 
his  thought,  glows  in  his  verse,  sanctifies  his  genius.  But 
it  does  not  appear  that  Catholic  dogma  was  an  intellectual 
necessity  to  him.  The  mystical  doctrines  irradiating  his 
poetry  are  a  theory  accepted,  not  a  conviction  gained  with 
great  price.  The  ardent  faith  of  Crashaw  reaches  the 
unbelieving  mind,  for  Crashaw  won  his  reward  of  faith  : 
Thompson,  like  Herbert,  leaves  us  unmoved  by  the  faith 
that  is  in  him.  His  metaphysical  theology  is  the  canvas 
backing  to  his  tapestry  ;  its  function  performed  it  has  no 
further  purposes  to  serve. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    PASSAGE    OF    THE    CENTURIES 

$  1.  Thomas  Hardy — A.  E.  Housman — Herbert  Trench— Stephen  Phillips 
— Laurence  Binyon — Maurice  Hewlett — C.  M.  Doughty — W.  W. 
Gihson — John  Masefield — Lascelles  Abercromhie.  §  2.  Laurence 
Housman — Richard  Le  Gallienne — A.  C.  Benson — H.  C.  Beeching— 
Norman  Gale — Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch — Sir  Henry  Newbolt. 
§  3.  H.  D.  Lowry — Alfred  Noyes — T.  Sturge  Moore — Hilaire  Belloc — 
G.  K.  Chesterton — Alfred  Williams — W.  H.  Davies — John  Drinkwater 
— Walter  de  la  Mare — Rupert  Brooke — James  Elroy  Flecker. 


BETWEEN  forty  and  fifty  years  ago  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy 
published  his  first  novel,  and  it  is  now  fully  twenty 
years  since  the  appearance  of  his  last  piece  of  long  work 
in  fiction.  As  a  novelist  he  belongs  to  an  earlier  chapter 
of  literary  history  than  any  which  falls  naturally  within 
the  survey  of  this  book.  But  as  a  poet  he  cannot  be 
neglected  in  the  present  chapter  where  we  are  concerned 
with  writers  still  living  and  many  of  them  young  ;  for 
his  novels,  among  the  greatest  in  English,  are  already 
classics  in  the  backward  of  time,  but  in  poetry  he  is  a 
post-Victorian  and  owes  nothing  to  the  tradition  of 
Browning,  Tennyson,  Matthew  Arnold  or  Swinburne. 
And  his  poetry,  like  his  fiction,  has  that  large  note  of 
universality,  that  boldness  of  imaginative  conception, 
which  sets  it  apart  from  the  work  of  any  living  poet, 
despite  Mr.  Hardy's  limitations  in  the  graces  of  the  poetic 
art.  It  is,  therefore,  natural  to  deal  with  his  work  as  a 
poet  first  and  singly  when  we  come  to  speak  of  poetry 
in  the  immediate  present.  The  poetry  treated  in  the  last 
chapter  belongs  to  or  is  contemporaneous  with  what  has 
been  called  the  renaissance  of  the  'nineties,  but  here  we 
are  occupied  with  a  poetry  still  in  evolution. 

When   Lionel   Johnson   wrote   his   admirable   critique, 

55 


56  POETRY 

The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy  (1894),  he  made  no  mention 
of  Mr*  Hardy  as  a  writer  of  verse,  treating 
Thomas  Hardy,  him  wholly  as  a  novelist  and  craftsman  in 
b.  1840.  prose.     It  was  not  till  four  years  later  that 

Mr.  Hardy  relinquished  prose  and  came 
forward  as  a  poet  with  his  not  insubstantial  volume  of 
Wessex  Poems  (1898).  Curiously  enough,  only  four  of  the 
poems  contained  in  this  volume  had  already  appeared  in 
print.  Critics  whose  sovereign  virtue  is  a  suspicion  of 
novelty  have  plunged  into  consistent  disparagement  of 
Mr.  Hardy's  poetic  faculty,  and  have  never  ceased  openly 
to  regret  that  a  master  of  prose  fiction  has  erred  and 
gone  astray.  But  he  held  on  his  way,  publishing  Poems 
of  the  Past  and  the  Present  in  1901,  another  miscellaneous 
collection  of  short  poems,  Time's  Laughing-stocks,  in  1909, 
and  between  these  two  came  The  Dynasts  in  three  volumes 
(1904-1908).  In  these  volumes  Mr.  Hardy  has  at  least 
justified  himself  by  conquering  a  natural  prejudice  against 
the  choice  of  a  new  form  of  expression,  and  winning 
recognition,  which  no  limitations  can  obscure,  for  the 
great  qualities  of  his  poetry. 

In  conception,  in  comprehensiveness,  in  the  wide  issues 
of  its  subject,  and  even  in  mere  length,  The  Dynasts  might 
have  taxed  the  imagination  and  intellectual  strength  of 
a  great  poet  in  the  prime  of  his  powers,  yet  it  is  the  work 
of  a  man  over  sixty  years  old,  who  has  given  the  best  of 
his  time  to  prose.  In  this  poem,  perhaps  more  than  in 
his  novels,  Mr.  Hardy  has  exhibited  that  extraordinary 
sense  of  proportion  and  relative  value  which  enables  him 
to  build  every  detail  of  a  vast  and  varied  scheme  into  an 
artistic  and  composite  whole.  The  architectural  faculty, 
upon  which  every  critic  of  Mr.  Hardy  insists,  shows  no 
sign  of  failure,  nor  is  there  loss  of  insight  in  the  great 
poetical  drama.  The  Dynasts,  when  completed,  was  hailed 
as  one  of  the  most  important  and  significant  things  in 
modern  literature,  as  a  "  new  species  of  writing,"  as  the 
indubitable  achievement  of  a  far-reaching  concept ;  and 
nothing  was  more  remarkable  than  the  complete  detach- 
ment of  the  author  from  the  poetic  methods  of  his  time. 
It  stood  by  itself  in  form,  method  and  spirit.  "  For  a  like 
achievement,"  wrote  a  critic  in  The  Times,  "  we  can  only 
go  back  to  one  thing — the  historical  plays  of  Shakespeare, 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  57 

where  great  and  small  are,  as  here,  seen  with  a  single  eye, 
and  where,  as  here,  the  common  life  of  common  humanity 
is  made  a  part  of  the  progress  of  history."  And  it  is, 
perhaps,  not  the  least  interesting  fact  relative  to  the 
poem,  when  we  consider  its  subject  and  complex  form, 
that  it  has  been  widely  read  by  the  average  frequenter 
of  the  lending  library. 

In  The  Dynasts  Mr.  Hardy  has  chosen  to  write  a  poem 
more  ambitious  in  scope  and  design  than  any  attempted 
by  a  poet  since  Faust  lay  for  nearly  sixty  years  in  the 
hands  of  Goethe.  The  nearest  approach  to  the  same 
range  of  imagination  in  any  English  poem  of  modern 
times  is  to  be  found  in  Shelley's  Prometheus  Unbound, 
and  incomparably  greater  in  splendour  of  poetry  as  is 
Shelley's  visionary  drama  it  reads  but  as  an  unrelated 
incident  compared  with  the  whole  experience  of  the  human 
race  when  placed  in  contrast  with  Mr.  Hardy's  great  work. 
In  The  Dynasts  he  has  dramatised  for  the  eye  of  the 
imagination,  not  for  the  stage,  the  chronicle  of  the 
Napoleonic  wars,  especially  as  they  are  related  to  English 
affairs,  in  three  parts,  nineteen  acts  and  one  hundred 
and  thirty  scenes.  Peer  Gynt  or  the  second  part  of  Faust 
may  be  adapted  to  the  stage  without  destroying  all  that 
lies  enfolded  within  their  poetry  or  hidden  in  those  far- 
withdrawn  regions  whither  the  mind  alone  can  travel ; 
but  in  The  Dynasts  the  appeal  is  directly  to  the  intellect 
working  through  the  imagination.  No  devices  of  the 
stage  could  compass  its  intention  ;  nor  will  a  love  of  pure 
poetry,  quasi  poetry,  commend  it  to  the  reader.  Mr. 
Hardy's  aim  has  been  to  set  forth  the  Napoleonic  epoch 
as  an  instantaneous  imaginative  vision  of  Europe  and 
to  impress  upon  the  reader  its  philosophical  significance, 
if  that  word  may  be  used  of  a  poem  which  disclaims  any 
hope  of  lifting  "  the  burthen  of  the  mystery."  No  mover 
of  scenes,  save  the  swift  working  of  the  mind,  is  competent 
to  the  changes  of  Mr.  Hardy's  drama.  At  the  close  of  a 
scene  we  may  be  asked  to  understand  that  the  Marchioness 
of  Salisbury's  reception-room  in  London  "  is  shut  over 
by  the  night  without,  and  the  point  of  view  rapidly 
recedes  south,  London,  and  its  streets  and  lights,  diminish- 
ing till  they  are  lost  in  the  distance,  and  its  noises  being 
succeeded  by  the  babble  of  the  Channel  waves  "  (II.  ii.  3). 


58  POETRY  [PART  1 

And  beyond  the  human  figures  of  the  great  scene  are 
supernatural  spectators  whose  chief  end  is  to  illustrate 
Mr.  Hardy's  deterministic  concepts.  The  Dynasts  is,  in 
the  words  of  Mr.  Lascelles  Abercrombie,  "  the  biggest, 
the  most  consistent  and  deliberate  exhibition  of  fatalism 
in  literature."  The  Pities  gaze  sadly  and  in  sympathy 
upon  the  spectacle  of  man's  helplessness,  the  Ironic 
Spirits  gleefully  note  the  wanton  malice  of  events,  but 
neither  can  influence  the  ancient  Spirit  of  the  Years  who 
has  looked  upon  it  all  from  time  unending  and  knows 
that  the  incessant  troubling  of  man  is  no  more  than  one 
manifestation  of  the  All-urging  Will  in  a  progress  that 
has  no  meaning,  good  or  bad,  to  evoke  either  pity  or 
ironic  laughter,  for 

"  like  a  knitter  drowsed, 

Whose  fingers  play  in  skilled  unmindfulness, 
The  Will  has  woven  with  an  absent  heed 
Since  first  life  was ;  and  ever  will  so  weave." 

Mr.  Hardy's  philosophical  concept  of  life  is  not  here  in 
question  ;  but,  however  little  its  value,  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  its  very  simplicity  and  consistency  lend  a  grandeur 
to  The  Dynasts  which  it  would  not  otherwise  possess.  To 
a  later  world  it  may  seem  as  strange  as  the  theologies  of 
Dante  and  Milton  are  to  the  modern  mind  ;  yet  as  cer- 
tainly as  these  earlier  poems  would  never  have  grown 
to  their  largeness  and  beauty  apart  from  that  concept 
of  the  universe  which  either  poet  held,  so  surely  Mr. 
Hardy's  impressive  drama  would  have  remained  unborn 
save  for  the  unchanging  and  comprehensive  determinism 
of  his  outlook  upon  life.  And,  if  we  refrain  from  judging 
it  purely  as  a  poem,  The  Dynasts,  in  the  grand  simplicity 
of  its  imaginative  scene,  wherein  the  land,  cities,  peoples 
and  armies  of  Europe  are  revealed  as  in  a  single  spectacle, 
moving,  breathing,  writhing  in  meaningless  and  self- 
immolating  tragedy,  is  the  most  impressive  achievement 
in  English  literature  for  two  or  three  generations.  But 
in  t  he  nobler  kind  of  poetry  it  fails,  save  in  brief  passages 
or  groups  of  lines,  such  as  those  quoted  above  ;  and  to 
meet  with  these  the  reader  must  endure  for  many  pages 
rough  and  unpleasing  blank  verse  unredeemed  by  any 
potency  or  magic  of  expression  and  marred  by  crudities 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  59 

that  no  pains  were  needed  to  avoid.  In  contrast  the  prose 
passages  are  simple  and  vigorous.  Only  incidentally  can 
The  Dynasts  please  in  its  parts  :  its  greatness  lies  in  the 
architectural  grandeur  of  the  all-embracing  conception  of 
which  it  is  built. 

Though  not  so  generally  recognised,  Mr.  Hardy's  achieve- 
ment with  the  short  poem  has  been  no  less  significant ; 
and  his  last  volume  shows  not  only  an  advance  in  treat- 
ment and  handling,  but  an  absolute  gain  in  poetic  content. 
The  bare  fact  that  a  writer  who  turns  to  poetry  late  in 
life  should  extend  his  reach,  the  intensity  of  his  expres- 
sion and  the  poetic  quality  of  his  thought,  is  as  curious 
as  it  is  remarkable.  And  though  few  of  us  will  share  the 
feeling,  it  is  now  possible  to  find  people,  whose  instinct 
upon  such  a  point  is  not  contemptible,  who  will  express 
a  preference  for  the  poet  above  the  novelist. 

The  statement  which  has  just  been  made,  that  Mr. 
Hardy  turned  seriously  to  verse  late  in  life  calls  for  some 
qualification.  At  least  thirty  poems,  and  probably  more, 
in  the  three  miscellaneous  collections  were  written  before 
any  of  the  novels  appeared.  Every  active  mind,  when 
it  makes  its  first  uncertain  ventures  in  original  expres- 
sion, begins  with  verse.  Mr.  Hardy  is  no  exception 
to  the  rule.  Though  the  rough  sonnets  of  the  early 
period  evidence  much  more  than  persevering  industry, 
he  fortunately  realised  that  he  was  sent,  to  put  it  in  his 
own  formula,  "  into  the  world  ...  by  the  all-immanent 
Will,"  as  a  writer  of  prose  ;  and  when  all  has  been  said, 
when  the  volumes  of  verse,  including  The  Dynasts,  have 
been  weighed  against  the  novels,  he  is  greater  as  a  prose- 
writer  than  as  a  poet.  When  the  balance  of  value  and 
permanent  worth  in  imaginative  prose  writing  during  the 
nineteenth  century  is  adjusted  a  hundred  years  hence, 
there  can  be  little  risk  in  the  prophecy  that  the  five 
greatest  of  Mr.  Hardy's  Wessex  tales  will,  for  qualities 
of  sincerity,  intensity  and  craftsmanship  retain  their  place 
with  the  best  that  has  yet  been  done  in  English.  The 
novelist  has  overshadowed  the  poet ;  but  the  glib  ease 
with  which  in  some  quarters  the  poet  has  been  deplored 
as  an  intruder  can  find  no  justification  in  the  volumes  of 
poetry. 

To  turn  over  Mr.  Hardy's  three  volumes  of  miscellaneous 


60  POETRY  [PART  i 

verse  is  to  be  impressed,  at  the  outset,  with  the  range 
and  variety  of  content,  with  the  "  bigness  "  of  the  world 
in  which  his  thought  and  imagination  move.  We  carry 
away  from  the  poems  that  conscious  awe  of  life's  wonder 
and  tragedy  which  the  novels  convey,  the  knowledge  that 
in  the  fields  and  lanes  of  Wessex  the  drama  of  individual 
existence  is  as  intense  and  inscrutable  as  in  the  larger 
whole  which  it  reflects.  We  have  sonnets,  dramatic  mono- 
logues, psychological  studies,  speculative  poems,  poems 
of  pilgrimage,  poems  of  war,  dialect  poems,  love  lyrics, 
songs,  ballads,  humorous  poems  and  epigrams  ;  and  it  can 
be  said  without  exaggeration  that  in  hardly  more  than 
half  a  dozen  instances  is  there  no  implication  of  the  latent 
mystery  which  is  behind  the  mood  and  incident  of  the 
moment.  Little  masters  of  song  can  write  lyrics  touched 
with  a  passion  or  subtle  emotion  which  seize  upon  us  for 
the  moment,  but  only  for  the  moment ;  they  are  hardly 
more  than  the  voice  of  a  transient  mood.  The  emotion 
of  Mr.  Hardy's  poetry  is  that  of  a  strong  personality,  too 
deep  to  break  out  into  the  feeling  which  has  no  essential 
relation  to  the  whole  attitude  of  his  mind  and  thought 
toward  the  problems  of  life  and  nature.  There  is  curiously 
little  change  in  character  between  the  early  and  the  later 
poems.  Mr.  Hardy  moves  with  greater  ease  in  the 
trammels  of  verse  now  than  when  a  young  man  ;  but  his 
melancholy,  his  deep  sense  of  pity,  his  haunting  conscious- 
ness of  the  irony  of  time  which  makes  men's  love  and 
hatred  and  envy  to  perish — these  are  the  same,  and 
reflect  themselves  in  the  earliest  as  in  the  latest  poems. 
He  is  convinced  that  "  a  man  cannot  find  out  the  work 
that  is  done  under  the  sun.  .  .  .  Yea,  farther,  though  a 
wise  man  think  to  know  it,  yet  shall  he  not  be  able  to 
find  it  "  ;  and  his  '  Young  Man's  Epigram  on  Existence,' 
written  in  1866,  echoes  the  thought  of  the  Preacher — 

"  A  senseless  school,  where  we  must  give 
Our  lives  that  we  may  learn  to  live  ! 
A  dolt  is  he  who  memorizes 
Lessons  that  leave  no  time  for  prizes." 

Many  of  the  early  poems,  which  have  been  reprinted, 
are  sonnets,  a  little  awkward  in  form,  uncertain  in  move- 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  61 

ment,  and  wanting  in  the  sweeping  lift  of  thought  and 
music  which  belongs  to  the  great  sonnet,  yet  admirably 
effective  in  unity  and  singleness  of  conception.  The 
sonnets  bring  before  us  Mr.  Hardy's  fondness  not  only 
for  the  poem  of  disillusion  in  love,  which  we  might  expect 
from  him,  but  a  theme  underlying  many  of  his  poems, 
which  was  also  a  stock  subject  with  Tennyson — the 
mesalliance.  His  treatment  of  one  of  the  world's  oldest 
stories  is  more  varied  than  Tennyson's,  and  it  is  also 
more  intellectual.  He  cares  less  for  details  ;  the  gentle- 
manly resignation  or  scolding  regrets  of  Tennyson's 
Middle-Victorian  people  may  be  there,  as  perhaps  they 
always  are,  but  for  Mr.  Hardy  they  are  not  the  essence 
of  the  matter,  and  he  passes  them  over  to  show,  often  in 
personal  monologue,  the  workings  of  the  mind  analysing 
the  feelings  of  the  heart  and  speculating  on  "  life's  little 
ironies."  He  displays  here,  as  in  his  novels,  that  com- 
bination of  tolerant  pity  and  intellectual  curiosity  which 
marks  his  attitude  toward  the  greatest  of  all  tragic 
problems — the  reason  of  sentient  existence.  Mr.  Hardy's 
lovers  never  wholly  lose  themselves  in  the  passionate  joy 
or  sorrow  of  the  moment ;  they  can  always  remember 
that  their  own  story  is  part  of  the  larger  tragedy  of  life, 
they  struggle  unsuccessfully  with  the  temptation  to 
believe  that  "  by  the  sadness  of  the  countenance  the  heart 
is  made  wiser,"  there  is  always  a  note  of  aloofness  in  their 
mental  attitude.  In  Mr.  Hardy's  poems  of  love  and 
regret  there  is  a  Shakespearean  breadth  of  conception  and 
thought.  No  other  writer  has  made  us  feel  so  clearly  and 
forcibly  the  unity  of  all  life,  the  presence  of  earth's  natural 
forces  in  the  drama  of  conscious  existence,  and  the  con- 
tinuity of  man  in  his  generations.  Individual  characters, 
personal  details,  and  the  circumstances  of  a  story  confined 
to  a  small  county,  are  brought  into  unity  with  the  whole 
drama  of  life,  its  inscrutable  yet  insistent  problems,  the 
mysteries  of  its  joy  and  pain.  The  value  of  the  dramatic 
monologue  for  purposes  of  reflection  and  speculative 
thought  in  poetry  was  raised  to  its  highest  power  by 
Shakespeare  in  the  plays  and  the  great  sonnet  series  ; 
it  was  with  this  form  that  the  two  great  poets  of  the 
latter  half  of  the  last  century  reached  their  finest  achieve- 
ments ;  and  Mr.  Hardy  reflects  a  contemporary  tendency, 


62  POETRY  [PART  i 

if  in  nothing  else,  in  his  adoption  of  this  method  of  expres- 
sion in  verse. 

In  the  three  volumes  of  short  poems  the  dramatic 
monologue  is  not  only  a  favourite  form  with  Mr.  Hardy, 
but  much  of  his  best  work  is  cast  in  this  mould.  That 
the  monologue  should  become  an  important  instrument 
of  poetry  in  an  introspective  age  is  not  surprising,  for, 
while  it  affords  opportunity  for  the  spontaneity  of  lyrical 
emotion,  it  embodies  the  more  purely  intellectual  qualities 
of  elegiac  poetry.  In  the  dramatic  monologue  the  poet 
can  find  not  only  a  natural  means  of  uttering  the  inex- 
plicable things  of  the  heart,  whence  are  "  the  issues  of 
life,"  but  emotion  may  be  combined  with  intellectual 
speculation,  and  the  two  may  pass  and  repass,  merge  or 
flow  in  separate  channels.  In  the  eighteenth  century 
the  impersonal  attitude  of  the  Essay  on  Man  was  the 
natural  form  of  the  reflective  poem  ;  but  the  insistent 
personal  note  of  the  nineteenth  century  demanded  the 
monologue.  In  one  or  another  form  of  the  dramatic 
monologue  the  most  memorable  of  Mr.  Hardy's  shorter 
poems  are  to  be  found — '  Her  Death  and  After,'  '  A  Sign 
Seeker,'  '  The  Two  Rosalinds,'  '  A  Tramp-woman's 
Tragedy,'  '  A  Sunday  Morning  Tragedy,'  '  In  the  Crypted 
Way.' 

The  four  last-named  poems  belong  to  Mr.  Hardy's  most 
recent  volume,  which  certainly  holds  his  finest  work  in 
pure  poetry.  In  this  collection  there  is  no  loss  of  content 
in  thought,  no  weakening  of  the  imaginative  powers,  and, 
in  point  of  poetic  diction,  in  the  moulding  of  metre  and 
the  use  of  words,  several  of  these  pieces  are  beyond  any- 
thing in  the  earlier  volumes.  It  is  rare  to  find  a  poet 
who  can  learn  and  make  use  of  experience  when  well  past 
middle  age.  The  exception  to  a  rule  which  Mr.  Hardy 
affords  is  attributable  doubtless  to  the  curious  impartiality 
with  which  he  combines  originality  of  genius  and  tem- 
perament with  a  readily  receptive  mind.  The  poems  are 
an  object  lesson  to  point  the  statement  that  originality 
of  the  highest  order  and  a  plastic  receptivity  play  con- 
current parts  in  the  production  of  Mr.  Hardy's  work. 

Of  the  poems  in  monologue,  which  have  been  named,  the 
most  striking  and  impressive,  as  well  as  the  most  charac- 
teristically Wessex,  is  '  A  Tramp-woman's  Tragedy ' ;  but 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  63 

it  is  overlong  for  quotation  in  extenso,  and  it  is  difficult  to 
give  less  than  the  whole.  '  In  the  Crypted  Way  '  is  short, 
inevitably  reminiscent  of  Browning,  yet  original ;  and  in 
all  that  it  reveals  and  suggests  without  definite  "  lining-in," 
is,  in  the  region  of  poetry,  surpassed  by  few  pieces  any- 
where. 

"  In  the  crypted  way,  where  the  passage  turned 

To  the  shadowy  corner  that  one  could  see. 

You  pause  to  part  from  me — plaintively ; 

Though  overnight  had  come  words  that  burned 

My  fond  frail  happiness  out  of  me. 

"  And  then  1  kissed  you — despite  my  thought 
That  our  spell  must  end  when  reflection  came 
On  what  you  had  deemed  me,  whose  one  long  aim 
Had  been  to  serve  you  ;  that  what  I  sought 
Lay  not  in  a  heart  that  could  breathe  such  blame. 

"  But  yet  I  kissed  you  :  whereon  you  again 
As  of  old  kissed  me.     Why,  why  was  it  so  ? 
Do  you  cleave  to  me  after  that  light-tongued  blow  ? 
If  you  scorned  me  at  eventide,  how  love  then  ? 
The  thing  is  dark,  Dear.     I  do  not  know." 

Mr.  Hardy's  advance  in  the  use  of  metre  and  poetic 
form  has  been  alluded  to  already  ;  but  nobody  will  study 
him  as  a  metrist  of  charm.  His  ear  is  not  sensitive  to  the 
subtle  harmonies  of  vocalic  and  consonantal  music  ;  and 
for  the  most  part  music  of  line  and  felicity  of  inevitable 
words  are  not  ends  for  which  he  labours.  For  many 
pages  he  seems  scarcely  to  use  a  word,  idiom  or  phrase, 
which  do  not  belong  to  prose,  yet  we  rarely  drop  into  a 
suspicion  that  we  are  reading  prose  edged  with  rhyme. 
The  style  is  too  individualistic,  and  the  thought  of  even 
the  baldest  of  the  poems  could  scarcely  be  put  so  well  in 
prose.  In  the  writing  of  a  poet  like  Mr.  Hardy,  whose 
great  qualities  lie  elsewhere,  the  occasional  flatness  and 
the  faults  of  his  versification  are,  perhaps,  points  unworthy 
of  attention.  He  becomes  uncertain  and  rough  when  he 
combines  anapaests  with  disyllabic  feet ;  and  in  easier 
metre  he  is  in  danger  of  tiring  the  ear  with  hammered 
accents.  In  '  The  Darkling  Thrush,'  for  example,  a  short 
poem  of  thirty-two  lines  in  common  measure,  there  is  only 
one  trisyllabic  foot  to  relieve  the  unbroken  beat  of  the 


64  POETRY  [PART  i 

lines.  It  might  almost  seem  that  Dr.  Johnson's  famous 
example  of  the  metre  was  followed  with  judicious  care. 
Many  of  the  earlier  poems  sing-song  distressingly,  or 
impinge  on  the  ear  heavily  without  variety  or  relief.  The 
last  volume  evidences  greater  skill  in  the  use  of  words, 
in  the  moulding  of  line  and  stanza,  and  a  few  poems 
could  hardly  be  bettered  in  form.  But  a  metrist  Mr. 
Hardy  is  not ;  and  few  can  so  well  afford  as  he  to  dis- 
pense with  the  graces  of  verse  making. 

The  note  of  melancholy,  the  doubt  of  any  ultimate 
ethical  and  spiritual  good  which  pervade  the  prose  and 
verse  of  Mr.  Hardy  has,  it  has  been  well  said,  far  from  a 
depressing,  an  almost  bracing  effect.  The  attitude  of 
his  mind  has  never  varied  ;  it  is  as  clear  in  the  early 
poems  as  it  is  in  the  late  ;  though  we  may  discern  in  the 
last  volume  the  quieter  tone  of  old  age,  which  no  longer 
strives  against  the  bars  of  the  world.  In  great  pessimists, 
different  as  they  are,  such  as  the  Preacher,  Schopenhauer, 
Carlyle,  Mr.  Hardy,  we  are  not  listening  to  petulant  out- 
bursts of  Byronic  disillusion.  The  thought  goes  deeper  : 
it  is  a  reasoned  belief,  the  frank  confession  of  logical 
inability  to  see  the  world  as  others  see  it,  to  accept  it 
upon  too  easy  terms.  This  is  Mr.  Hardy's  attitude  ;  he 
does  not  doubt  the  sincerity  of  optimism  ;  but  he  is  as 
sincerely  incapable  himself  of  discovering  its  justification. 
The  poet  finds  himself  at  a  cathedral  service,  and  acknow- 
ledges— 

"  That  from  this  bright  believing  band 

An  outcast  I  should  be, 
That  faiths  by  which  my  comrades  stand 

Seem  fantasies  to  me, 
And  mirage-mists  their  Shining  Land, 

Is  a  drear  destiny." 

Yet  he  bids  those  who  think  differently  to  himself  to 
remember  that  the  "  bird  deprived  of  wings  "  does  not 
"  go  earth-bound  wilfully,"  but  because  it  must.  And 
herein  lies  the  root  of  the  whole  matter. 

As  we  should  expect  from  a  student  of  personality  and 
temperament  of  Mr.  Hardy's  power  and  insight,  those 
poems  which  may  be  described  as  psychological  studies 
of  character  are  of  great  interest.  A  large  proportion  of 
the  whole  number  of  his  shorter  poems  might  be  brought 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  65 

into  the  class  without  difficulty,  for  intellectual  intro- 
spectiveness  is  the  bent  of  Mr.  Hardy's  mind  ;  but  a 
certain  smaller  number  falls  more  directly  within  this 
category.  And  here  again,  in  '  The  Slow  Nature,'  '  The 
Two  Men,'  '  Middle-age  Enthusiasms,'  '  In  a  Looking- 
glass,'  '  The  King's  Experiment,'  '  The  Conformers,'  the 
whirligig  of  time,  the  irony  of  fate,  is  the  single  thought 
which  pervades  the  poems.  The  unchanging  form  of 
Time  is  personified  ;  it  broods  over  the  life  of  man ; 
without  haste  and  without  remorse  it  works  its  uncon- 
scious will  upon  him.  We  are  reminded  of  the  like 
sentient  endowment  which  Mr.  Hardy  gives  to  the  unseen 
forces  of  earth,  sky  and  air  in  the  novels.  The  irony  of 
man's  littleness,  the  vacillation  of  his  character  with  the 
passing  years,  the  limitations  of  his  heart  and  intellect 
in  the  face  of  all-embracing  time  are  reiterated.  The 
young  man  knows  that  the  glow  of  romance  will  die  down 
into  the  "  frigid  tone  of  household  speech,"  that  those 
who  come  after,  forgetting  the  love  romance,  will 

"  .  .  .  as  they  grave  ward  glance, 

Remark  :  '  In  them  we  lose 
A  worthy  pair,  who  helped  advance 
Sound  parish  views  ! " 

On  the  other  hand,  the  poet  finds  '  In  a  Looking-glass  ' 
the  pathos,  not  less  great,  of  those  who  grow  old,  while 
the  impulses  of  the  heart  are  still  fresh  and  warm.  The 
mystery  of  time  weighs  upon  his  thought  and  imagination. 
This  is  true  of  him  not  only  in  his  later  years  ;  for  '  The 
Two  Men  '  (1866),  one  of  his  earliest  poems,  is  imbued 
with  the  same  profound  sense  of  the  insufficiency  of  human 
endeavour  and  ambition,  the  same  consciousness  that 
"  there  is  one  event  unto  all."  The  '  War  Poems,'  '  Poems 
of  Pilgimage,'  and  some  of.  the  narrative  poems  escape 
this  obsession  ;  but  if  we  turn  to  that  part  of  the  last 
volume  which  falls  under  the  title  of  '  Love  Lyrics,' 
expecting  to  find  songs  "  all  breathing  human  passion," 
we  shall  either  be  disappointed,  or  interested  to  read 
lyrics  of  love,  or  more  often  its  loss,  tinged  with  at  least 
as  much  intellectualism  as  passion.  This  is  not  to  say 
that  passion  is  wholly  absent ;  but  the  lover  as  often 
turns  to  dissect  the  nature  of  his  regrets  and  hopes  as 


66  POETRY  [PART  i 

to  utter  his  feelings  without  reflection.  Among  Mr. 
Hardy's  shorter  pieces,  however,  not  a  few  of  the  most 
truly  poetical,  both  in  form  and  content,  belong  to  this 
section. 

It  is  curious  that  so  few  poems  of  the  novelist  of  Wessex 
should  be  in  dialect ;  for  Mr.  Hardy  makes  no  attempt 
to  work  the  same  ground  as  Barnes's  Poems  in  the  Dorset 
Dialect.  Poems  containing  dialect  there  are — '  Friends 
Beyond,'  '  The  Curate's  Kindness,'  '  The  Homecoming  ' 
and  '  The  Fire  at  Tranter  Sweatley's,'  which  was  first 
printed  in  bowdlerised  form  in  the  Gentleman's  Magazine, 
over  forty  years  ago.  The  best  version  of  this  spirited 
piece  is  that  in  Wessex  Poems,  where  the  author  has 
supplied  more  dialect  than  in  that  printed  by  Mr.  Lane 
in  the  appendix  to  The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy.  But  in 
the  matter  of  dialect  and  the  use  of  local  idiom  Mr. 
Hardy  has  gone  his  own  way  ;  and  his  poetry  almost 
entirely  eschews  these  things. 

An  insistence  upon  the  more  obvious  characteristics  of 
Mr.  Hardy's  work  as  a  poet  tends  to  obscure  aspects  and 
issues  which  are  hardly  less  significant  and  interesting. 
Mr.  Hardy  is  not  primarily  a  poet,  but  a  prose-writer 
whose  great  achievement  it  has  been  to  raise  the  standard 
of  plot  construction  in  the  writing  of  the  English  novel, 
while  he  is  first  and  foremost  an  artist  endowed  with  a 
profoundly  original  vision  of  human  life.  The  strength 
of  the  poems,  as  of  the  prose,  is  the  backing  of  an  original 
and  self-centred  personality.  Mr.  Hardy's  insight  may 
sometimes  be  obscured  by  limitations  of  temperament ; 
he  may  ring  the  changes  of  thought  and  situation  upon  a 
narrow  cycle  ;  yet  even  in  his  repetitions  he  never  trifles 
with  his  subject  or  works  by  rote.  He  is  never  without 
content ;  and  even  in  the  slightest  poem  of  two  stanzas 
we  are  conscious  that  we  are,  never  far  from  the  confines 
of  the  larger  issues  of  life.  There  is  a  reality  wider  than 
the  poem  ;  almost  every  poem  makes  us  feel  that  the 
thought  is  greater  than  the  expression— and  of  how  little 
poetry  or  prose  can  this  much  be  said  ?  Even  in  the  few 
pieces  of  lyric  song  there  is  a  breadth  and  simplicity  of 
thought  and  emotion  which  carry  us  away  to  days  of 
less  strain,  artifice  and  nervous  complexity  than  our 
own. 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  67 

A  study  of  Mr.  Hardy's  poetry  almost  inevitably  brings 
to  mind  Mr.  A.  E.  Housman,  a  poet  of  like  temper,  whose 

verse  centres  in  the  life  and  people  of  one 
A.  E.  Housman,  county.  Mr.  Housman  has  contented  him- 
b.  1859.  self  with  the  publication  of  a  single  volume 

of  verse,  A  Shropshire  Lad  (1896),  and  the 
unease  he  shows,  the  wistful  melancholy  informing  nearly 
all  his  poems,  suggest  that  they  were  written  when  he 
was  a  young  man  and  had  not  yet  reached  the  stage  of 
indifferent  resignation  many  sink  into  at  the  fourth  decade 
of  life.  Yet  Mr.  Housman' s  reflective  melancholy,  his 
faithlessness  in  the  immortalities,  has  no  sentimentality 
or  morbid  pettiness.  His  melancholy  has  been  compared 
to  that  of  Mr.  Hardy,  and  like  Mr.  Hardy's  discovery  of 
life's  unmeaning,  Mr.  Housman' s  philosophy  of  disbelief 
is  strong  and  bracing.  His  attitude  is  simply  summarised 
in  a  poem  of  mingled  humour  and  earnest — 

"Therefore,  since  the  world  has  still 
Much  good,  but  much  less  good  than  ill 
And  while  the  sun  and  moon  endure 
Luck's  a  chance,  but  trouble's  sure, 
I'd  face  it  as  a  wise  man  would. 
And  train  for  ill  and  not  for  good." 

In  Mr.  Housman's  world  the  gods  kill  us  for  their  sport 
and  life  is  an  irony  ;  as  often  as  not  the  reward  is  given 
to  him  who  did  not  toil,  and  the  bride  lies  by  another 
while  the  green  grass  and  clover  grow  above  her  lover. 
Mr.  Housman,  like  Mr.-  Hardy,  has  a  stoic  faith  in  the 
courage  to  endure,  but  he  takes  no  pride  in  hiding  his 
sympathy  for  the  suffering  of  simple  and  obscure  people 
who  sink  beneath  their  fate.  Nearly  all  his  poetry  is  of 
the  dales  and  woodlands  of  Shropshire,  of  the  life  of  the 
people  on  the  soil  and  in  the  market  town,  but  it  is  not 
a  pastoral  poetry.  His  diction  is  entirely  simple,  he 
writes  of  the  primitive  and  changeless  in  life,  but  his 
simplicity  is  that  of  the  cultivated  and  thoughtful  mind 
holding  itself  aloof.  He  uses  ballad  measure,  but  his 
thought  is  elegiac  ;  no  impassioned  emotion  sways  him 
to  the  loss  of  his  soul.  Though  he  writes  of  earth  and 
the  life  of  the  soil,  and  his  vocabulary  is  admirably  simple, 
his  poetry  reveals  in  every  line  the  reflective  melancholy 


68  POETRY  [PART  i 

of  the  scholar  and  recluse.  Few  volumes  of  poetry  pub- 
lished within  the  last  quarter  of  a  century  possess  qualities 
which  make  for  enduring  life  as  Mr.  Housman's  single 
book  of  verse.  His  vision  of  life  is  ii/ensely  poetical, 
he  never  writes  a  poem  that  is  empty  of  thought,  image 
or  idea,  for  he  must  have  something  whereof  to  sing  ; 
and  in  nuance,  in  subtle  and  exquisite  cadences  of  music 
and  rhythm  only  one  living  poet  has  a  more  beautiful 
faculty  than  he— Mr.  Bridges.  And  whereas  few  poems 
of  Mr.  Bridges  have  a  content  that  satisfies,  Mr.  Housman 
rarely  fails  to  utter  some  thought.  Mr.  Bridges'  is  largely 
an  art  of  verse  ;  poetry  demands  more  than  melody— 
the  lesser  art  of  the  musician.  A  Shropshire  Lad  holds  a 
collection  of  poems  of  almost  entire  perfection,  like  stones 
cut  to  many  facets  and  beautifully  reflecting  the  light  in 
many  aspects,  whether  we  regard  them  merely  as  verse 
exercises,  strong  and  simple  reflection  on  life,  or  poetry 
of  elegiac  emotion.  The  level  is  wonderfully  even,  and 
it  is  hard  to  discriminate  between  these  poems,  but  in 
one,  '  Be  still,  my  soul,  be  still,'  Mr.  Housman  rises  above 
his  ordinary  manner  to  a  large  and  spacious  utterance 
which  sets  the  poem  apart. 

After  the  mention  of  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy  the  problem 
of  differentiation  between  the  more  important  writers  of 
verse  in  our  day  becomes  increasingly  difficult,  relations 
and  distinctions  can  hardly  be  discovered  or  stated  in 
set  words  ;  and,  in  general,  we  must  content  ourselves 
with  the  study  of  the  individual  poet,  avoiding  the  tempta- 
tion to  find  impossible  and  fanciful  links  of  connection 
with  others.  In  the  middle  of  the  last  century  the  wide 
and  prevailing  influences  in  poetry  were  simple  and  clearly 
marked  ;  the  impulses  of  the  period  spent  themselves, 
and  in  the  last  twenty-five  years,  although  certain  tenden- 
cies already  marked  can  be  defined,  the  course  of  English 
poetry  has  largely  resolved  itself  into  individual  and  dis- 
connected aims.  And  therefore  in  continuing  this  section 
of  the  present  chapter  it  will  only  be  possible  to  bring 
together  poets  of  larger  endowment  and  higher  distinction 
than  their  contemporaries,  and  assign  to  another  section 
poets  of  narrower  range  and  lesser  talent,  noting,  when- 
ever they  manifest  themselves,  common  influences  or 
ideals.  It  was  natural  to  name  A  Shropshire  Lad  in 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  69 

immediate  conjunction  with  the  poetry  of  Mr.  Thomas 
Hardy,  not  only  in  view  of  a  likeness  in  temper  and  mood 
between  the  poets  of  Wessex  and  Shropshire,  but  because 
the  genius  of  Mr.  A.  E.  Housman  places  him  with  the 
first  of  living  English  poets.  His  name  is  not  widely 
known  to  the  large  army  of  desultory  readers  who  take 
their  knowledge  of  contemporary  poetry  from  informa- 
tion provided  by  literary  periodicals,  nor  is  Mr.  Herbert 
Trench  one  of  the  best  known  poets  of  the  day.  They 
flaunt  no  sensationalism  or  violences  of  language  to 
prove  their  astonishing  originality  to  the  gaping  crowd, 
as  the  custom  has  been  in  the  last  few  years,  but 
it  may  safely  be  prophesied  that  so  far  as  beauty  of 
melody,  felicity  of  phrase,  and  high  gifts  of  simple  and 
sincere  imagination  can  confer  lasting  fame,  Mr.  A.  E. 
Housman  and  Mr.  Herbert  Trench  need  not  fear  an  early 
oblivion. 

Mr.   Herbert   Trench's   career   opened   brilliantly.     He 
won  distinctions  at  Oxford  and  a  fellowship  at  All  Souls' 

College.  He  has  since  been  a  civil  servant, 
Herbert  Trench,  a  manager  of  the  Haymarket  Theatre, 
b.  1865.  and  he  has  travelled  widely  in  Europe 

and  the  Near  East.  His  life  has  thus  been 
full  and  active  ;  but  he  is  by  birth  a  native  of  the  world 
of  mind.  Art  and  the  expression  of  life  in  art  are  for 
him  the  chief  end  in  life.  It  is,  therefore,  surprising  that 
his  first  volume  of  verse,  Deirdre  Wedded  (1901),  did  not 
appear  till  he  was  in  his  thirty-sixth  year.  The  title- 
poem  of  this  volume  chooses  as  a  theme  no  established 
incident  from  the  story  of  Deirdre,  that  magnificent 
subject  handled  by  nearly  all  Irish  poets  and  dramatists, 
but  an  episode  invented  by  the  poet.  The  story  is  told 
by  three  chanters  chanting  out  of  three  different  epochs 
in  three  metres.  The  voice  of  Fintan  out  of  the  first 
century  speaks  in  blank  verse,  the  voice  of  Cir  out  of 
"  a  century  more  remote,  but  unknown,"  speaks  in  a 
four-line  stanza  of  ragged  anapaests,  the  voice  of  Urmael 
out  of  the  sixth  century  speaks  in  a  ten-line  stanza  of 
iambic  pentameters.  Fintan,  who  speaks  twice,  has  the 
advantage  of  the  first  and  last  word.  Variation  of  metre 
in  a  single  poem  may  be  used  with  singular  appropriate- 
ness to  changes  in  theme  and  matter — Tennyson's  Vision 


70  POETRY  [PART  i 

of  Sin  is  an  example  that  occurs  to  mind — but,  as  Mr. 
William  Archer  pointed  out  long  since,  there  seems  no 
differentiation  between  the  sections  of  Mr.  Trench's  brief 
epic  which  warrants  these  curious  experiments  in  metre 
and  the  adoption  of  a  form  tiresome  in  its  artificiality. 
In  a  poem  of  direct  narrative,  tinged  with  the  epic  manner, 
Mr.  Trench's  scheme  can  only  be  regarded  as  an  unfor- 
tunate device  which  detracts  from  the  beauty  of  the  work 
as  a  whole.  It  destroys  all  sense  of  unity  ;  and  a  further 
fault  is  that  Mr.  Trench  shows  little  consciousness  of  fit 
conjunction  between  theme  and  language.  With  all  their 
affectations  the  poets  of  the  Irish  school  have  recognised 
that  the  stories  of  Deirdre  and  Oisin  are  so  far  removed 
from  modern  vision  and  thinking,  that  they  can  only  be 
told  in  a  special  vocabulary  differing  from  modern  English 
as  widely  as  the  otherworldliness  inherent  in  these  stories 
of  a  dim  past  differs  from  the  spirit  of  a  practical  and 
commercial  age.  Mr.  Trench's  metres  and  style  have  no 
psychical  relation  to  his  matter.  The  total  impression 
of  Deirdre  Wedded  is  of  a  poem  which  largely  fails  for 
the  want  of  restraint  in  diction  and  care  in  the  moulding 
of  metre.  The  blank  verse  exhibits  extraordinary  liberties 
in  the  use  of  trochees  and  anapaests  ;  the  anapaestic  lines 
lack  measured  swing  ;  and  the  iambic  pentameters  are 
often  curiosities. 

"  For  his  heart,  after  thee  rising  away  " 

can  by  no  ingenuity  be  scanned  as  an  iambic  line.  And 
nobody  would  suspect  as  other  than  prose  Mr.  Trench's 
verse  when  written  thus — 

"  But  when  an  upward  space  of  grass — so  free — so  endless — 
beckoned  to  the  realms  of  wind  Deirdre  broke  from  his  side, 
and  airily  fled  up  the  slopes,  flinging  disdains  behind." 

All  Mr.  Trench's  verse  in  this  poem  has  pace  and  vigour, 
we  are  carried  swiftly  on  our  way,  but  the  technique  is 
weak  and  faulty.  His  vocabulary  is  often  tortured  beyond 
a  degree  of  tolerance.  His  passion  for  double  epithets 
is  extraordinary.  Sometimes  they  are  used  with  effect, 
and  sometimes  preposterously.  The  "^.wind-sleek  turf " 
is  a  good  image,  and  the  "  green-litten  air  "  of  the  woods  ; 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  71 

but  the  "  ravage- whetted  bulk  "  of  the  boar  conveys  no 
idea,  and  the  "  flake-soft "  descent  of  Deirdre's  hand 
suggests  not  snow  but  the  scaling  off  a  surface. 

The  blundering  awkwardness  of  much  of  the  poem 
is  surprising  when  we  reflect  on  its  many  beauties,  its 
onrush,  its  gift  of  imaginative  phrasing  which  arrest 
and  hold  us.  In  romantic  and  mystical  landscape  paint- 
ing none  of  the  Irish  poets,  hardly  Shelly  himself  in 
Prometheus  Unbound  or  Alastor,  has  surpassed  these 
lines  of  Mr.  Trench — 

"  So  they  measured  the  Plain  of  the  Dreamers,  the  Brake  of  the 

Black  Ram, 

Till  the  Crag  of  the  Dances  before  them  did  shape  and  loom. 
And  the  Meads  of  the  Faery  Hurlers  in  silver  swam 
Then  up  to  the  Gap  of  the  Winds,  and  the  far-seen  tomb 
White  on  Slieve  Fuad's  side." 

There  is  so  much  of  beauty,  true  imagination  and  power 
of  language,  especially  of  epithet,  in  Mr.  Trench's  poem, 
that  it  is  of  far  greater  moment  and  importance  than  the 
complete  successes  of  other  poets  in  easier  fields. 

Mr.  Trench  is  not  a  rapid  writer.  Not  till  six  years 
after  his  first  did  his  second  volume,  New  Poems  (1907), 
appear.  It  contained  the  finest  of  his  poems,  the  long 
and  allegorical,  '  Apollo  and  the  Seaman.'  Apollo  comes 
to  earth  and  sits  sharing  a  jug  of  wine  with  a  sailor  who 
tells  him  that — 

"  I  heard  them  calling  in  the  streets 

That  the  ship  I  sei-ve  upon — 
The  great  ship  Immortality — 
Was  gone  down,  like  the  sun." 

The  poem  proceeds  in  the  form  of  a  dialogue  between 
Apollo  and  the  seaman,  leading  up  to  the  conclusion, 
announced  by  Apollo,  that  the  true  nature  of  immortality 
is  racial,  not  individual,  and  that  the  wrorld  is  permeated 
with  God. 

"  Yet  leaf  shall  of  leaf  become  aware 

On  the  self-same  bough  and  stem, 
Whose  branches  are  murmuring  everywhere  ; 
And  the  heaven  floods  all  of  them." 

The  versification  in  passages  is  not  without  its  rough- 
nesses, but  for  the  most  part  Mr.  Trench  uses  his  common 


72  POETRY  [PART  i 

measure  strongly,  simply  and  melodiously.  The  tempta- 
tion to  quote  passage  after  passage  from  this  noble  poem, 
remarkable  for  the  direct  simplicity  of  its  allegory,  the 
sincerity  of  its  mystic  interpretation  of  life,  the  beauty 
of  its  imagery  and  the  music  of  its  verse  is  hard  to  resist. 
In  an  age  when  cheap  and  sentimental  mystic  systems 
have  become  a  vogue  with  drawing-rooms  and  literary 
coteries  it  is  a  relief  to  turn  from  artifice  and  facile  ecstasies 
to  reality.  '  Apollo  and  tlie  Seaman  '  is  a  poem  of  atmo- 
sphere and  often  reminds  the  reader  of  The  Ancient 
Mariner,  but  not  with  the  suggestion  of  derivation. 

The  same  volume  contains  another  allegorical  poem  of 
some  length  in  '  The  Queen  of  Gothland,'  some  noble 
Stanzas  to  Tolstoy,'  a  curiously  poignant  but  metrically 
rough  poem,  '  The  Questioners,'  and  a  number  of  shorter 
lyrics,  not  one  of  which  is  negligible.  In  the  wealth  of 
its  diction,  in  the  mingled  truth  and  beauty  of  its  mystic 
apprehension  of  life,  in  its  imaginative  content  Mr.  Trench's 
New  Poems  is  a  volume  that  takes  a  place  in  the  first 
order  of  poetry  written  within  this  century. 

Lyrics  and  Narrative  Poems  (1911)  is  chiefly  a  rearrange- 
ment of  older  verse.  Among  the  new  poems  the  ode, 
'  On  Romney  Marsh  at  Sunrise  '  and  '  Bitter  Serenade,' 
are  marked  by  that  true  emotion  which  distinguishes 
the  best  of  Mr.  Trench's  lyrical  poetry. 

Mr.  Trench  is  far  from  being  a  prolific  writer  ;  and  in 
what  he  has  written  he  has  not  always  been  careful,  even 
if  all  allowance  be  made  for  his  purposeful  disregard  at 
times  of  the  mere  graces  of  verse.  In  this  it  is  plain  that 
he  has  written  with  his  eyes  open.  But  he  is  better  than 
himself,  and  the  greater  part  of  his  poetry  is  not  only 
imaginatively  conceived  but  melodiously  executed.  In 
Mr.  Trench  we  recognise  the  scholar  imbued  with  a  love 
of  art  and  a  passion  for  poetry,  a  scholar  and  a  poet  who 
never  loses  touch  with  life  and  those  philosophical  ques- 
tionings which  knock  throughout  the  generations  at  the 
heart  of  man.  In  '  Apollo  and  the  Seaman,'  in  the  odes, 
and  in  the  short  lyrics  he  is  the  poet  of  an  optimistic 
faith  and  philosophy.  It  is  his  belief  that  :  "In  alliance 
between  the  arts  of  Poetry  and  Music,  and  in  the  philosophic 
ideas  they  may  together  convey  lies  .  .  .  much  of  promise 
for  our  civilisation."  In  the  genius  of  Mr.  Trench  there 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  73 

is  a  mingling,  of  adventurous  romanticism,  intuitive 
mysticism  and  reasoned  philosophy  comparable,  magno 
intervallo,  to  the  endowment  of  Coleridge.  The  mysticism 
of  the  Celt  in  his  nature  is  balanced  by  an  English  level- 
headedness :  his  vision  of  the  world  is  almost  equally 
pictorial  and  abstract,  for  his  abstract  ideas  readily  take 
the  form  of  poetic  allegory. 

In  choice  of  theme — classic  legend  or  mediaeval  romance 
— in  resemblances   between  their  use   of  verse,   rhymed 
or  unrhymed,  and  in  other  parallelisms 
Stephen  Phillips,        of    manner     the     names     of    Stephen 
1868-1915.  Phillips,  Mr.  Laurence  Binyon  and  Mr. 

Maurice  Hewlett  present  a  natural  con- 
junction,  and  among  poets   of  the  day  they   are  note- 
worthy, although  in  the  case  of  not  one  of  the  three  is 
the  measure  of  inspiration  constant  or  abundant.     The 
name  of  Stephen  Phillips  is  associated  in  the  popular  mind 
with  the  revival  of  poetic  drama  on  the  English  stage. 
His  early  experience  as  an  actor  was  here  of  value  to 
him,  but  the  gifts  he   possessed  were  lyric   rather  than 
dramatic.     Nevertheless,  he  was  caught  by  the  fascina- 
tion of  the  theatre  when  a  young  man.     At  the  end  of 
his  first  term  at  Cambridge  he  left  the  University  and 
joined  the  Shakespearean  company  of  Mr.  F.  R.  Benson, 
with  whom  he  remained  for  six  years.    After  abandoning 
the  stage  he  was  for  a  short  time  an  army  coach  before 
definitely  turning  to  literature.     In   1890   he  published 
with    his    cousin,    Mr.    Laurence    Binyon,    and    others    a 
booklet  of  verse,  entitled  Primavera.     None  of  the  poems 
of  this  brochure  is  of  significance  ;  but  with  Eremus  (1894), 
a  lengthy  blank-verse  poem,  Phillips   won  the  praise  of 
critics  like  Symonds  and  Stopford  Brooke.     Despite  its 
many    metrical    shortcomings    and    its    shapeless    con- 
struction Eremus  gave  evidence  of  poetic  vision  and  the 
power  to  write  fluent  and  rapidly  moving  blank  verse. 
The  narrative  of  this  pessimistic  allegory  is  almost  ludi- 
crous.    Eremus  is  borne  to  the  regions  of  Chaos  to  dis- 
cover that  the  Creator  makes  worlds  and  planets  for  his 
sport  and  leaves  them  to  drift  to  ruin.     On  his  return  to 
earth  Eremus,  with  unpardonable  tactlessness,  reveals  his 
discoveries  in  the  supernatural  world.    The  allegory,  such 
as  it  is,  shows  no  depth  or  intellectual  force  ;    the  verse, 


74  POETRY  [PART  I 

though  disfigured  by  metrical  violences,  is  not  without 
beauty  and  vigour  ;  and  the  dialogue,  freely  used,  may 
be  regarded  as  an  early  indication  of  dramatic  bent  in 
the  young  actor-poet's  mind. 

Christ  in  Hades  (1896),  a  blank-verse  narrative  of 
Christ's  descent  to  the  nether  world  and  his  meeting  with 
Virgil,  Prometheus  and  other  figures,  is  of  no  higher  merit 
allegorically  or  imaginatively,  but  it  had  the  distinction 
of  bringing  into  the  arena  of  the  daily  paper  and  the 
street  placard  a  discussion  upon  the  legitimate  uses  of 
trochees  and  inverted  stresses  in  English  blank  verse. 
Eremus  no  less  than  Christ  in  Hades  is  rich  in  lines  difficult 
of  scansion  on  any  principles  yet  known.  In  1898  Mr. 
James  Douglas  appeared  in  the  Star  as  the  champion  of 
Milton  against  Stephen  Phillips.  Phillips  replied,  and  the 
battle  was  ranged  upon  either  side  between  those  who 
refused  to  be  persuaded  by  his  justification  of  his  eccen- 
tricities and  those  who  roundly  declared  "it  would  be 
as  impossible  for  Mr.  Phillips  to  write  a  halting  line  as, 
let  us  say,  for  Sarasate  to  play  out  of  tune."  The  critic 
just  quoted  cites  as  an  example  of  Phillips'  music  these 
lines  from  Christ  in  Hades — 

"  The  bright  glory  of  after-battle  wine, 
The  flushed  recounting  faces,  the  stern  hum 
Of  burnished  armies." 

Lines  more  intolerable  it  would  be  difficult  to  conceive. 
They  bristle  with  faults.  The  trochee  in  the  second  foot 
of  the  first  line  and  the  disregard  of  elision,  the  caesura 
and  collapse  of  stress  in  the  fourth  and  virtual  spondee 
in  the  fifth  foot  of  the  second  line,  all  combine  to  produce 
an  effect  so  cacophonous  that  we  stand  in  amaze  that 
Phillips,  a  careful  student  of  metres,  should  succeed  in 
passing  it.  To  pursue  his  versification  further  would  here 
be  out  of  place.  Enthusiastic  defenders  of  his  irregularities 
in  the  two  early  blank-verse  poems  may  take  it  as  matter 
for  reflection  that  in  his  later  blank  verse,  in  '  Marpessa  ' 
and  the  plays,  Phillips  evidently  took  his  chiding  to 
heart,  for  in  these  a  change  to  a  more  careful  method 
of  versification  can  hardly  pass  unnoticed.  And  with 
an  advance  in  technical  mastery  he  wrote  a  few 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  75 

passages  of  melodious  blank-verse  hardly  rivalled  by 
any  contemporary. 

The  Poems  of  1897  gained  the  doubtful  laurel  ..wreath 
of  the  Academy  one  hundred  guinea  prize,  and  once  more 
the  name  of  Stephen  Phillips  was  blazoned  abroad  to  the 
millions  of  poetry  lovers  who  read  the  evening  papers. 
The  volume  contained  beside  Christ  in  Hades,  already 
published,  another  long  poem,  '  Marpessa.'  The  cadences 
of  the  blank  verse  of  '  Marpessa,'  and  the  paragraph  struc- 
ture represent  a  striking  advance  upon  Phillips'  earlier 
work.  In  variation  of  stress  and  rhythm,  in  the  harmonious 
and  ready  flow  of  the  lines,  in  the  form  of  his  sentences  he 
succeeded  in  using  his  verse  in  a  manner  scarcely  rivalled 
since  Tennyson's  Ulysses  and  Morte  d"  Arthur.  And  in 
many  single  lines  and  phrases  there  come  those  swift 
analogies  which  are  the  essence  of  fine  poetry.  He  often 
achieves  surprising  condensation  of  thought  and  imagery 
in  two  or  three  lines,  as  in — 

"thy  life  has  been 
The  history  of  a  flower  in  the  air, 
Liable  but  to  breezes  and  to  time, 
As  rich  and  purposeless  as  is  the  rose." 

And  he  does  not  often  sink  to  the  level  of  images  so  falsely 
conceived  and  absurdly  expressed  as — "  lilies  musical 
with  busy  bliss."  The  poem  tells  how  Marpessa  having 
been  given  her  choice  between  Apollo,  the  immortal,  and 
Idas,  a  mortal,  chose  Idas.  And  the  noblest  passage 
of  human  poetry  Phillips  has  written  is  that  in  which 
Marpessa  gives  reason  for  her  choice. 

"  But  if  I  live  with  Idas,  then  we  two 
On  the  low  earth  shall  prosper  hand  in  hand 
In  odours  of  the  open  field,  and  live 
In  peaceful  noises  of  the  farm,  and  watch 
The  pastoral  fields  burned  by  the  setting  sun. 
And  he  shall  give  me  passionate  children,  not 
Some  radiant  god  that  will  despise  me  quite, 
But  clambering  limbs  and  little  hearts  that  err. 
And  I  shall  sleep  beside  him  in  the  night, 
And  fearful  from  some  dream  shall  touch  his  hand 
Secure  ;  or  at  some  festival  we  two 
Will  wander  through  the  lighted  city  streets ; 
And  in  the  crowd  I'll  take  his  arm  and  feel 
Him  closer  for  the  press.     So  shall  we  live." 


re  POETRY  [PART  I 

In  strength,  tenderness  and  purity  nothing  fails  in  this 
passage.  The  beauty  of  its  music  is  only  marred  by  the 
intrusion  of  two  trochees  where  they  ought  not  to  be, 
and  the  grave  simplicity  of  the  style  by  the  use  of  one 
conventional  phrase — "  pastoral  fields." 

'  Marpessa  '  is  by  far  the  finest  poem  of  the  volume. 
The  realism  of  '  The  Woman  with  the  Dead  Soul '  misses 
effect  in  diffuseness.  '  The  Wife  '  is  sordid  without  point 
or  moral.  Nor  are  the  short  lyrics  of  outstanding  beauty  ; 
but  the  brief  blank  verse  '  To  Milton — Blind  '  is  a  fine 
and  simple  poem  of  address. 

Several  of  the  early  poems — '  Marpessa,'  '  Christ  in 
Hades  ' — showed  a  tendency  to  the  use  of  dialogue,  but 
there  was  no  special  evidence  of  dramatic  faculty  till, 
at  the  request  of  Sir  George  Alexander,  Phillips  wrote 
Paolo  and  Francesco,  (1899),  the  first  of  the  blank-verse 
plays  which  gave  to  the  author  the  distinction  of 
reviving  poetic  drama  on  the  stage  with  some  measure 
of  success.  As  dramatic  poets  Tennyson  and  Browning 
notably  failed,  despite  the  genuine  dramatic  power  of 
'  A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon.'  James  Sheridan  Knowles 
had  stagecraft,  but  he  was  utterly  deficient  in  imagination 
and  poetry.  Swinburne's  plays  were  hardly  written  for 
the  stage,  and  the  same  statement  holds  true  of  the  work 
of  that  poet  of  genius,  Beddoes.  The  poetic  drama  of 
the  nineteenth  century  is  a  drama  of  the  study  ;  what- 
ever its  intention  its  end  is  poetry,  not  drama.  The 
age  of  Elizabeth  was  an  age  of  action,  of  outward  pomp 
and  show,  of  extravagance  in  dress,  of  magnificent  affecta- 
tions in  deportment  and  conduct,  reflected  in  the  writers 
of  the  period  in  an  almost  universally  diffused  power  of 
dramatic  composition.  The  age  of  Victoria,  an  age  of 
science,  of  intellectual  and  ethical  megrims,  fostered 
lyric  and  elegiac  poetry.  Into  one  or  other  of  these 
classes  nearly  all  the  poetry  of  the  century  falls.  Nor 
did  Phillips  escape  this  limitation  as  a  dramatist. 
The  poetry  of  great  drama  must  be  objective,  for  it  is 
the  projection  of  the  author's  imagination  into  the  minds 
of  differing  characters  :  lyric  poetry  is  subjective,  and 
therefore  incongruous  with  true  drama.  Stephen  Phillips, 
from  experience,  had  a  knowledge  of  the  actor  on  the 
boards  and  his  needs  ;  he  was  painfully  eager  to  allow  no 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  77 

pause  in  action,  lest  the  vitality  of  his  drama  should 
suffer  ;  he  was  fully  conscious  of  the  value  of  adventitious 
aids,  such  as  the  sound  of  trumpets,  the  murmuring  of 
crowds,  the  use  of  asides,  swift  alternations  between  the 
intense  and  the  lighter  treatment  of  life.  But  these  are 
adventitious  aids  and  have  neither  part  nor  lot  in 
the  essence  of  great  drama.  And  Phillips  came  short 
of  great  poetic  drama,  because,  among  other  reasons, 
the  poetry  of  his  dialogue  is  not  flexible  to  the  sway  of 
mood  in  differing  characters.  Or,  put  summarily,  his 
poetry  is  a  garment  of  dialogue,  it  is  not  the  inevitable 
utterance  of  the  soul  in  its  transcendent  moments  :  it 
lends  beauty  to  his  plays,  it  gives  them  no  additional 
dramatic  power.  His  poetry  is  a  decoration  and  serves 
little  purpose  in  the  interpretation  of  personality.  For, 
though  he  possessed  a  genuine  dramatic  gift,  his  poetry 
was  lyrical ;  but  it  was  his  good  fortune  as  a  poet  for 
the  stage  to  express  himself  better  in  blank  verse  than 
in  any  other  metre.  Yet  the  series  of  his  poetic  dramas 
was  hailed  at  first  with  triumphant  panegyrics.  Professor 
Churton  Collins  declared  that  Paolo  and  Francesco,  gave 
Phillips  kinship  "  with  Sophocles  and  Dante."  To-day 
this  unbalanced  outburst  only  excites  a  smile,  and  we 
are  puzzled  to  conceive  how  anybody  could  be  led  to 
attribute  to  a  beautiful  but  slight  lyric  the  grandeur 
of  Sophocles  or  Dante.  The  tragedy  of  man  in  all  his 
generations  is  mirrored  in  the  older  poets  :  in  Phillips' 
poem  we  are  never  tempted  to  look  beyond  the  pathos  of 
Paolo  and  Francesca's  love-story.  Nevertheless,  follow- 
ing Mr.  Archer,  it  may  be  said  of  Phillips'  first  drama, 
that  he  has  taken  a  story  shrined  in  beauty  by  Dante  and 
has  rendered  it  again  without  derogating  from  its  beauty. 
Paolo  and  Francesca  is  not  undramatic,  but  it  is  some- 
thing better — one  of  the  most  beautiful  long  poems 
written  in  the  last  century,  within  which  it  just  succeeds 
in  falling.  The  stories  of  Paolo  and  Francesca  and  of 
Tristram  and  Iseult  are  the  two  most  beautiful  of  the 
world's  stories  of  transgression,  because  they  tell  not 
of  indulgence,  but  of  love  that  is  lord  of  the  earth. 
Phillips'  poem  is  beautiful  as  a  whole,  and  it  is  also  full 
of  that  magic  of  poetry  in  single  and  pictorial  phrases 
which  he  lost  later,  which,  indeed,  he  never  reached 


78  POETRY  [PART  i 

again  in  nearly  equal  measure,  save  in  Ulysses.  The 
description,  for  example,  of  the  stillness  before  dawn  is 
exquisitely  and  magically  beautiful. 

t(  So  still  it  is  that  we  might  almost  hear 
The  sigh  of  all  the  sleepers  in  the  world, 
And  all  the  rivers  running  to  the  sea." 

The  characters  of  the  drama  are  living,  they  are  far  from 
being  mere  puppets,  but  they  are  subsumed  to  the  general 
lyrical  atmosphere  of  the  play  rather  than  strongly 
delineated.  Paolo  and  Francesca  are  romantic  embodi 
ments  of  youth  and  pure  passion,  Giovanni  Malatesta 
is  a  brooding  and  sinister  pattern  of  the  dramatic  type 
to  which  he  belongs,  and  Lucrezia,  the  best  drawn  character 
of  the  play,  is  the  middle-aged  woman  of  the  world  in 
whom  the  sympathies  of  motherly  tenderness  are  awakened 
by  the  helplessness  and  innocent  purity  of  Francesca. 
The  dramatis  personce  are  well-known  types,  seen  before 
and  recognised  again,  but  Paolo  and  Francesca  contains 
no  strong,  original  or  creative  character-drawing. 

The  brilliant,  hard  and  spectacular  character  of  his 
theme  in  Herod  (1900),  the  second  of  his  dramas,  gave 
Phillips  less  opportunity  as  a  poet,  and  we  are  con- 
scious that  he  does  his  best  in  spite  of  rather  than  for 
the  sake  of  his  subject.  The  background  of  political 
affairs  also  hampers  him  ;  for  politics  do  not  enter  readily 
into  drama.  And,  further,  Phillips  made  the  mistake 
of  rendering  in  blank  verse  the  quick  give-and-take  of 
half-sentences  and  exclamatory  phrases — an  impossi- 
bility. In  Paolo  and  Francesca  and  Ulysses  he  wisely 
used  prose  in  many  scenes,  and  Herod  would  be  the 
better  for  a  liberal  use  of  prose  dialogue.  Blank  verse 
cannot  be  snipped  asunder  successfully  :  it  is  the  function 
of  drama  in  verse  to  utter  the  thoughts  of  the  heart,  not 
to  render  back  the  common  colloquialisms  of  everyday 
speech.  And  the  poetry  of  the  longer  speeches  in  Herod 
comes  short  of  Phillips'  best  powers,  although  detached 
lines  and  thoughts  of  great  beauty  are  not  wholly  wanting. 
The  impassioned  outbursts  of  Herod  in  the  second  act 
occasionally  almost  reach  the  extravagant  metaphorical 
splendour  of  Elizabethan  drama. 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  79 

"I  arise, 

And  spill  the  wine  of  glory  on  the  ground  : 
'I  turn  my  face  into  the  night." 

On  its  first  performance  these  lines  and  passages  of  a  like 
nature  suggested  to  enthusiasts  a  comparison  between 
Herod  and  the  dramatic  poetry  of  Webster. 

Ulysses  (1902),  even  more  emphatically  than  Herod, 
is  poetry  wedded  to  spectacular  scenes,  not  drama  :  it  is 
to  be  read  rather  than  performed,  and  in  its  ideal  and 
mythical  setting  it  loses  itself  in  undramatic  lyricism.  In 
Ulysses  Phillips  regained,  however,  the  poetic  inspiration 
which  had,  in  part,  been  checked  by  Herod. 

At  this  stage  Phillips  was  still  to  be  considered  as 
the  lyric  poet,  possessed  of  some  stagecraft,  who  sought 
to  restore  poetic  drama  to  the  theatre.  In  the  dramas 
which  followed  he  threw  in  his  lot  with  the  makers  of 
problem  plays,  and  his  poetry  suffered  because  the  author's 
attention  was  divided.  Yet  the  first  two  acts  of  The  Sin 
of  David  (1904),  first  produced  in  1914,  are  dramatically 
most  successful ;  the  verse,  though  not  arresting,  is 
admirably  suited  to  its  purpose,  and  the  author  does 
not  stray  into  lyric  irrelevance.  The  characters  of  Colonel 
Mardyke,  the  stern  Puritan,  Miriam,  his  beautiful  wife, 
and  Sir  Hubert  Lisle,  who  sins  with  her  the  sin  of  David, 
are  drawn  in  firm  and  convincing  outline.  But  the  third 
act,  placed  four  years  later,  collapses  dramatically  ;  and 
the  pseudo-happy  ending  over  the  body  of  the  dead  child 
of  Lisle  and  Miriam  is  a  fault  in  taste  and  ethic  only 
saved  from  repulsiveness  by  its  melodramatic  senti- 
mentality. Nero  (1906)  is  likewise  a  problem  play — a 
sketch  of  stages  in  Nero's  mental  degeneration  rather  than 
a  drama.  It  is  longer  and  more  diffuse  than  the  earlier 
plays,  and  in  poetry  a  retrogression.  The  craftsmanship 
of  the  verse  is  good,  but  there  is  hardly  a  trace  of  those 
felicities  of  phrase  and  thought  which  marked  '  Marpessa,' 
Paolo  and  Francesca,  Ulysses  and  The  Sin  of  David. 
On  the  other  hand  the  play  does  give  evidence  of  a 
genuine  gift  of  psychological  insight.  Without  unnecessary 
elaboration  or  labour  Phillips  shows  Nero  not  as  the 
monster  of  purposeful  cruelty,  but  the  man  with  giant 
powers  of  self-deception,  who,  in  the  worst  of  his  moods, 


80  POETRY  [PART  i 

the  destruction  of  his  mother,  his  attempts  to  seduce 
Poppsea,  his  burning  of  Rome,  regards  himself  as  one  who 
cannot  sin,  the  least  malicious,  most  gentle  and  highly- 
gifted  of  men. 

Pietro  of  Siena  (1910)  is,  like  The  Sin  of  David,  founded 
upon  one  of  the  world's  well- worn  problem  tales — in  this 
case  the  bribe  of  a  brother's  life  for  the  sacrifice  of  chastity. 
The  temptation  is  resisted,  the  riotous  libertine,  like  the 
lover  of  Pamela,  offers  marriage,  all  are  reconciled  and 
we  end  to  the  music  of  marriage  bells.  The  treatment  is 
too  conventional  for  the  subject.  The  construction  of  the 
play  is  good  ;  but  the  theme  is  sifted  through  the  imagina- 
tion like  fine  sand  and  leaves  nothing  behind.  The  ethical 
standpoint,  as  vulgar  as  Richardson's,  would  surprise  us 
in  Stephen  Phillips  had  we  not  already  met  with  his  lapse 
in  The  Sin  of  David.  And  in  poetry  we  are  conscious  that 
he  strives,  without  success,  to  reach  the  standard  of  his 
earlier  days.  Only  once  in  the  play  do  we  meet  with 
lines  possessing  the  magic  of  his  best  manner. 

"  A  voice  that  stole  on  us 

Like  strings  from  planets  dreaming  in  faint  skies, 
With  a  low  pleaded  music." 

This  was  the  last  of  Phillips'  poetic  dramas  cast  in  the 
Elizabethan  mould.  In  The  King  (1912)  he  essayed  a 
drama,  constructed  after  the  Greek  model  in  a  series  of 
continuous  scenes,  based  upon  the  story  of  Don  Carlos. 
The  play  is  comparatively  short,  and  whereas  the  scheme 
does  not  serve  to  differentiate  the  play  in  any  essential 
way  from  the  earlier  dramas,  the  poetry  illustrates  the 
author's  exhaustion.  The  only  passage  of  beautiful  and 
impassioned  writing  is  the  renunciatory  speech  of  Christina 
in  the  second  scene.  Of  this  speech  the  author  need  not 
have  been  ashamed  at  the  height  of  his  powers.  But  it 
does  little  more  than  accentuate  by  contrast  the  poverty 
of  the  rest  of  the  play. 

It  is  only  twenty  years  since  Paolo  and  Francesca  was 
hailed  with  extravagant  praise  as  the  dawn  of  a  new  era  ; 
and  of  Stephen  Phillips  it  was  hoped  that  he  would  bring 
again  to  the  theatre  the  dayspring  of  poetry  banishing 
the  long  night  of  prose.  A  few  years  have  passed,  his 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  81 

plays  have  been  played,  and  the  night,  to  all  appearances, 
has  settled  upon  them,  for  managers  show  no  anxiety  to 
risk  a  revival.  Stephen  Phillips  succeeded  no  better  than 
Tennyson,  whose  plays  are  not  contemptible  dramatically, 
and  yet  we  hardly  trouble  to  weigh  them  in  any  estimate 
of  his  genius.  Ibsen's  powers  as  poet  or  dramatist  are 
set  far  above  the  plane  of  Stephen  Phillips,  but  Brand  and 
Peer  Gynt  can  only  be  read,  and  Ibsen's  social  dramas 
are  written  in  a  bald  prose  which  avoids  the  faintest 
tincture  of  poetry.  The  writing  of  poetry  that  justifies  itself 
dramatically  in  its  power  of  revealing  character  is  of  all 
the  gifts  of  genius  the  most  rare.  It  manifested  itself 
first  in  Greek  tragedians  at  Athens  in  her  great  day, 
again  with  varying  power  in  English  dramatists  of  Eliza- 
beth's reign,  a  little  later  in  Corneille,  Racine  and  Moliere, 
in  the  next  century  in  Schiller  and  slightly  in  Goethe.  In 
ages  and  countries  widely  separated  true  poetic  drama 
has  flourished,  and  we  are  not  yet  justified  in  asking 
with  despair  whether  the  world  has  not  grown  too  old 
and  sophisticated  for  a  living  and  breathing  poetry  of 
the  theatre.  If  it  is  not  now  yet  it  will  be.  But  it  was 
not  given  to  Stephen  Phillips  to  restore  poetic  drama  in 
England,  for  his  poetry  was  intrinsically  lyric,  adorning 
his  dialogue,  not  vivifying  his  characters.  Nor  is  there 
any  clear  originality,  belonging  to  himself  and  his  age, 
distinguishing  his  poetical  and  dramatic  methods.  The 
influences  shaping  his  drama  are  three,  Elizabethan, 
Greek  and  classical  French.  Greek  influence  is  most 
clearly  exhibited  in  The  King,  and  elsewhere  in  the  rigid 
economy  of  his  method,  the  influence  of  French  classic 
drama  in  the  stately  stiffness  of  many  of  his  passages, 
and  Elizabethan  influence  in  the  cultivation  of  paradoxical 
metaphors  like  that  contained  in  the  lines  often  praised — 

"  The  red-rose  cataract  of  her  streaming  hair 
Is  tumbled  o'er  the  boundaries  of  the  world." 

Like  others  who  attempted  to  write  poetic  drama  in  the 
nineteenth  century  Phillips  was  derivative,  and  his 
success  was  no  greater  than  theirs. 

Phillips'     later    non-dramatic    verse    is    contained    in 
New  Poems  (1908),  The  New  Inferno  (1911)  and  Lyrics 


82  POETRY  [PART  i 

and  Dramas  (1913).  In  the  first  volume  are  gathered 
together  poems  belonging  to  several  years  and  collected 
from  various  quarters.  The  blank  verse  '  Endymion '  is 
not  in  his  best  manner,  but  '  Grief  and  God,'  written  in 
heroic  couplets,  after  a  bad  beginning  with  two  detest- 
ably ugly  lines  continues  as  a  beautiful  poem.  The  short 
lyrics  of  this  volume  are  more  likely  to  linger  in  the  memory 
than  the  longer  poems.  In  verbal  magic  and  music  two 
poems  of  regret,  '  A  Girl's  Last  Words '  and  '  To  a 
Lost  Love '  are  among  the  most  beautiful  Phillips  ever 
wrote,  although  the  latter  is  too  obviously  copied  from 
Rossetti's  '  Blessed  Damozel.'  The  New  Inferno  is  a  poem 
of  nine  cantos  written  in  blank  verse  oddly  divided  into 
stanzas  of  four  lines.  For  the  ordinary  reader,  unbiassed 
by  scholarly,  antiquarian  or  historical  interests,  even  the 
poetry  of  Dante  has  to  struggle  hard  disburdening  itself 
of  a  vision  of  life  more  alien  to  the  modern  mind  than  the 
concepts  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  poets.  To  those  who 
desire  poetry  the  narrative  and  background  of  Dante's 
poem  are  a  veil  shutting  out  the  light.  For  a  modern 
poet  to  adopt  the  same  form  is  to  invite  much  weariness. 
The  poet  of  The  New  Inferno  is  escorted  by  a  guiding 
spirit  through  regions  of  the  lower  world  where  he  sees 
successively  Napoleon,  the  souls  of  those  who  on  earth 
indulged  their  appetites,  self-slayers,  and  others,  and 
various  ethical  problems,  such  as  the  reason  for  the 
creation  of  dangerous  drugs,  are  inconclusively  solved. 
The  poem  closes  upon  a  note  of  hope  for  all  souls  alike. 
The  book  is  not  without  true  poetry,  especially  in  the 
eighth  canto,  where  we  enter  "  the  sea  of  lawless  thoughts." 
But  as  the  early  allegory,  Eremus,  was  ill-fashioned,  so 
is  this.  Not  one  of  the  latest  volumes  contained  poetry 
to  match  the  Poems  of  1897.  Lyrics  and  Dramas  does 
nothing  to  enhance  our  conception  of  Phillips'  powers 
as  a  poet.  Nearly  all  the  pieces  are  short  and  trivial 
lyric  musings.  Two  narrative  poems,  '  Prosperity '  and 
'  The  Blow  '  do  not,  however,  fail  to  embody  the  tragic 
emotion  of  either  story  ;  and  '  Shakespeare  '  exhibits  the 
poet's  earlier  command  of  language.  But  these  are 
insufficient  to  redeem  a  volume  of  verses  seldom  touched 
by  any  powerful  overflow  of  feeling. 

Mr.   Laurence  Binyon  is  Stephen  Phillips'  cousin  ;  in 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  83 

Primavera,  the  small  paper-covered  volume  of  1890, 
their  poems  appeared  side  by  side,  and  features  of 

likeness  more  essential  may  be  found 
^1889°  y°n>  in  their  work.  More  than  a  dozen 

years  ago  Mr.  Archer  declared  that 
the  talent  of  Mr.  Binyon  was  epic  ;  Mr.  Streatfield  was 
equally  persuaded  that  it  was  lyric.  At  that  time  he 
was  to  be  judged  as  a  writer  of  epic  poetry  by  Porphyrion 
(1898),  a  blank-verse  narrative  poem  of  fifteen  hundred 
lines,  and  since  he  has  attempted  nothing  that  aims  at 
epic  breadth,  for  the  blank  verse  Penthesilea  (1905)  is 
shorter  by  five  hundred  lines.  Mr.  Archer  was  carried 
away  with  admiration  for  the  romantic  glow  of  poetry  in 
Porphyrion,  a  poetry  which  is,  however,  lyrical  and 
destroys  rather  than  supports  the  claim  of  the  poem  to 
be  considered  an  epic.  The  subject  is  that  of  many  a 
youthful  poem — an  allegory  of  the  soul's  quest.  A  young 
man  of  Antioch,  fascinated  by  the  principle  of  Christian 
asceticism  flies  to  the  desert,  but  an  apparition  of  magical 
beauty  changes  his  nature,  and  he  returns  to  the  world  in 
search  of  ideal  loveliness.  The  theme  of  Penthesilea, 
which  tells  how  the  Queen  of  the  Amazons  sought  death 
at  the  hand  of  Achilles  in  expiation  for  having  slain  her 
sister  unwittingly,  is  more  tolerant  of  epic  treatment. 
But  that  Mr.  Binyon  is  lyrical  by  gift  is  proved  by  the 
aridity  of  Penthesilea  ;  it  has,  less  than  Porphyrion,  the 
glow  and  fervour  of  poetry,  for  the  poet  is  tormented  by 
the  necessity  to  narrate.  In  the  earlier  poem  he  had  a 
lyric  theme  and  treated  it  in  lyric  blank  verse  ;  in  the 
later  he  has  a  tale  to  tell,  and  he  drops  into  mere  narra- 
tion. Narrative  in  blank  verse  scarcely  constitutes  an 
epic  poem,  and  the  lyrical  Porphyrion  with  its  more 
human  note,  the  finely  imaginative  passages  descriptive 
of  scenes  in  desert  and  city,  its  less  apparent  artifice  and 
greater  spontaneity  is  the  poem  of  the  two  that  better 
endures  a  second  reading.  Yet  it  is  by  no  means  an  out- 
standing poem.  As  the  cadences  of  Penthesilea  inevitably 
call  to  mind  the  second  version  of  Hyperion,  so  Porphyrion 
is  reminiscent  of  Milton's  blank  verse.  Both  poems  serve 
to  persuade  us  that  Mr.  Binyon's  gift  of  poetry  lies  in  a 
vague,  dreamy  lyricism,  sometimes  inspired  by  life  but 
more  often  by  literature. 


84  POETRY  [PART  i 

In  1890  Mr.  Binyon  won  the  Newdigate  with  a  poem 
on  Persephone,  and  in  the  same  year  he  published  a  few 
poems  in  Primavera,  which  call  for  no  comment.  Nor 
do  the  volumes  that  follow,  Lyrical  Poems  (1894),  Poems 
(1895)  and  The  Praise  of  Life  (1896)  reveal  any  note- 
worthy advance  in  poetical  powers,  strength  of  thought 
or  imaginative  gifts.  And  often  Mr.  Binyon  is  capable 
of  being  dull  or  lapsing  into  ugly  crudities  of  thought 
and  phrase.  His  verse-writing  first  showed  distinction 
in  the  two  parts  of  London  Visions  (1896-99),  which  were 
republished  in  an  augmented  edition  in  1908.  In  expres- 
sion and  style  London  Visions  showed  individuality  ;  but 
as  an  observer  of  life  Mr.  Binyon  is  too  academic.  To 
read  these  descriptions  of  varied  and  motley  humanity 
is  but  to  be  forcibly  reminded  of  their  flatness  when  com- 
pared with  the  full-blooded  buoyancy  of  a  Walt  Whitman, 
or,  to  take  a  more  modern  contrast,  the  humorous  cynicism 
of  Mr.  James  Stephens  in  portraying  character.  Mr. 
Binyon's  poems  do  not  reveal  or  flash  London  upon  us  ; 
he  is  at  his  best  when  he  abandons  the  effort,  unnatural 
to  him,  of  realistic  observation  and  writes  poems  like 
'  The  Threshold '  in  the  form  of  an  ode,  or  becomes 
purely  subjective  and  lyrical  as  in  '  Trafalgar  Square.' 
Poems  like  '  Whitechapel  High  Road  '  and  '  The  Road 
Menders,'  which  aim  at  realistic  painting,  are  laboured 
and  monotonous  and  fail  to  bring  life  near.  As  a 
literal  rendering  of  things  seen  by  far  the  best  poem 
of  the  two  volumes  is  '  The  Little  Dancers.'  But,  in 
general,  Mr.  Binyon's  observation  of  life  and  types 
fails  to  illuminate,  save  when  he  turns  aside,  as  he  does 
in  '  Salvation  Seekers,'  to  comment  on  psychological 
causes. 

At  this  time  Mr.  Binyon's  highest  achievement  in  pure 
poetry  was  '  The  Threshold,'  and  it  was  not  surprising 
that  he  reprinted  this  poem  in  his  fine  volume  of  Odes 
(1901.)  The  Odes  and  Porphyrion  show  more  of  true 
inspiration  than  any  other  part  of  his  work  as  a  poet ; 
for  in  the  Odes '  The  Dryad,'  '  The  Bacchanal  of  Alexander,' 
'  Amasis  '  and  the  third  part  of  '  The  Death  of  Tristram  ' 
are  finely  conceived  and  impassioned  poems.  To  quote 
a  short  passage  from  any  of  these  would  be  to  do 
Mr.  Binyon  an  injustice ;  but  without  cavil  he  has 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  85 

never  done  greater  work  than  in  '  The  Bacchanal  of 
Alexander,'  a  spirited  poem,  filled  with  the  glow  and 
colour  of  the  summer  scene  and  riotous  abandon  of  life 
it  describes. 

The  Death  of  Adam  and  other  Poems  (1903)  adds  nothing 
of  real  value  to  his  earlier  work.  The  verse  and  imagery 
of  the  title-poem  are  too  strongly  reminiscent  of  Keats's 
Hyperion  to  give  pleasure.  Of  the  shorter  poems  the 
beautiful  '  Santa  Cristina  '  may  alone  compare  with  the 
best  of  his  earlier  lyrics,  and  it  is  disfigured  by  the  choppi- 
ness  of  the  rhyming  octave  couplets. 

Dream  Come  True  (1905)  contains  a  collection  of  formal 
and  metaphysical  love-lyrics  ;  and  Paris  and  CEnone  (1906) 
and  Attila  (1907)  are  blank- verse  tragedies.  None  of 
these,  either  dramatically  or  poetically,  is  of  especial 
interest.  The  verse  is  not  easily  flexible  ;  and  in  Attila 
too  classical  in  character  to  lend  itself  to  the  semi-barbaric 
scene.  Meredith's  wonderful  poem  on  the  same  subject 
is  a  far  more  realistic  and  vivid  painting  of  barbaric 
and  brutal  life  in  the  camp  of  the  Huns.  Auguries  (1913) 
contains  grave  and  regular  verse  embodying  the  not  too 
eager  musings  and  emotions  of  a  cultivated,  thoughtful, 
but  not  original  mind.  '  The  Tram  '  reverts,  not  unsuc- 
cessfully, to  the  method  of  realistic  painting  of  drab  life 
early  essayed  in  London  Visions.  In  '  The  Mirror,'  a 
finely  expressed  poem,  the  words  catch  some  fire  from  a 
genuine  emotion  ;  but  we  are  left  unmoved  by  the  serene 
and  self-conscious  writing  of  nearly  every  other  poem  in 
the  volume. 

Mr.  Binyon  did  not  again  approximate  to  the  standard 
of  his  writing  in  Porphyrion  and  the  Odes  till  eight  years 
passed  and  he  published  in  1909  England  and  other  Poems. 
At  least  three  poems  of  this  volume,  '  Sirmione,'  '  Ruan's 
Voyage  '  and  '  Milton,'  stand  with  the  best  of  his  work. 
'  Sirmione  '  has  the  colour,  passion  and  descriptive  power 
of  the  odes  in  the  volume  of  1901.  In  the  magic  of  pure 
poetry  Mr.  Binyon  has  never  surpassed  '  Ruan's  Voyage,' 
a  narrative  poem  written  in  varied  metres.  His  touch  is 
wonderfully  sure.  As  an  example  of  swift  painting,  the 
scene  in  which  Ruan,  the  fisherman,  opens  the  magic  box 
and  three  hundred  years  pass  over  him  in  the  flight  of  a 
moment  may  be  quoted — 


86  POETRY  [PART  i 

"  Ere  he  can  pray,  ere  he  can  groan, 
Swift  as  grass  in  a  furnace  thrown, 
Or  a  crumbled  clod  in  a  heedless  hand, 
He  withers  into  whitened  bone. 
Where  his  breathing  body  stood, 
Flushed  with  life  and  warm  with  blood, 
Is  a  heap  of  ashes,  a  drift  of  sand, 
And  the  wind  blowing,  and  the  silent  strand." 

Mr.  Binyon's  verse  has  by  no  means  the  constant  note 
of  unconscious  and  unpremeditated  song ;  he  gains  his  ends 
deliberately,  with  self-knowledge,  and,  with  some  excep- 
tion, the  clear  passion  of  true  poetry  is  only  to  be  found 
in  Porphyrion,  the  Odes,  in  two  or  three  of  the  poems  in 
London  Visions  and  in  England.  His  work  rarely  fails  to 
do  him  credit  as  a  scholar  and  student  of  literature,  but 
genuine  poetry  springs  from  life  and  not  from  books, 
and  Mr.  Binyon,  even  in  his  poems  of  premeditated 
realism,  is  not  closely  in  touch  with  substantial  human 
nature  ;  in  less  than  half  his  writing  does  he  escape  an 
attitude  of  chilly  and  academic  detachment.  He  is, 
therefore,  more  the  poet  when  he  departs  from  everyday 
life  to  kingdoms  of  myth,  mysticism  or  pure  imagination. 
His  poetry  combines  the  qualities  of  fine  scholarship, 
cultivated  taste  and  a  nature  sensitive  to  the  ideal  of 
beauty.  He  never  offends  against  good  feeling ;  he  is 
not  guilty  of  meaningless  crudities  like  the  allegory  of 
Phillips'  Eremus,  the  dull  purposelessness  of  '  The  Wife ' 
or  the  false  denouement  of  The  Sin  of  David  and  Pietro 
of  Siena.  To  compare  the  work  of  the  two  writers  is  to 
recognise  that  in  the  immediacy  of  a  poetry  which  springs 
from  the  void  unsought  Phillips  far  surpassed  Mr. 
Binyon,  for  it  is  only  occasionally  in  the  poetry  of  the 
latter  that  we  escape  a  consciousness  of  effort,  labour 
and  the  use  of  the  file.  In  sudden  and  unexpected  sur- 
prises of  thought  and  phrase,  in  the  picture-making 
quality  of  his  words,  in  wealth  of  imagery  Mr.  Binyon, 
save  rarely,  falls  short  of  Stephen  Phillips'  highest  attain- 
ment in  the  Poems,  Paolo  and  Francesca  and  Ulysses. 
For  Mr.  Binyon  is,  like  Pater,  the  academic  aesthete,  he 
is  never  sufficiently  in  contact  with  the  stress  and  bustle 
of  a  rough  and  hard-driven  world — in  a  word,  his  poetry 
is  never  full-blooded. 


CHAP,  ni]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  87 

Save  that  Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett  is  more  impassioned 
and  more  intimately  in  sympathy  with  men  and  women 
as  creatures  of  flesh  and  blood,  much 
Maurice  Hewlett,  that  has  been  said  of  Mr.  Binyon  applies 
b.  1861.  with  equal  relevance  to  his  work  as  a 

poet.  His  volumes  of  verse  do  not  give 
proof  of  a  gift  of  poetry  prodigally  bestowed.  Much  of  his 
writing  is  suggestive  of  restrained  declamation  rather  than 
poetry  ;  neither  words  nor  thoughts  are  winged.  And, 
further,  the  level  of  attainment  is  monotonously  even — 
just  words  in  a  sufficiently  good  order,  but  rarely  the 
best  words  in  the  best  order.  In  the  first  two  volumes 
the  emotion  of  the  reader  is  never  roused,  and  in  not  a 
line  is  there  the  fire  of  lyric  inspiration.  Neither  in  phrase 
or  melody  has  Mr.  Hewlett's  early  verse  any  spontaneity. 
His  poetry  is  the  verse  of  a  man  gifted  with  a  fine  sense 
of  literature  and  not  devoid  of  passion,  although  he 
expresses  himself  better  in  prose  than  in  verse.  Of  poetry 
in  a  transcendent  sense  Mr.  Hewlett  has  scarcely  written 
a  line. 

A  Masque  of  Dead  Florentines  (1895),  written  partly  in 
rhyming  octosyllables  and  partly  in  iambic  pentameters, 
presents  a  processional  passage  of  the  Florentine  dead — 
Dante,  Petrarch,  Boccaccio  and  others — and  gives  evidence 
of  a  mind  tempered  to  the  splendour  and  fascination  of 
Florentine  history,  but  the  poetry  has  no  spell  or  charm. 
Songs  and  Meditations  (1897)  is  divided,  as  the  title 
indicates,  into  two  parts,  and  in  neither  is  Mr.  Hewlett 
notably  successful.  The  gift  of  quick  song  is  not  his,  and 
he  is  not  genuinely  meditative  by  temperament.  A 
scholarly  romanticism  eked  out  with  an  interest  in  the 
intrusion  of  the  passions  is  the  groundwork  of  Mr.  Hewlett's 
writing.  Among  the  songs  of  his  second  volume  of  verse 
'  Divae  Genetricis  Laudes  '  has  ampler  music  and  imagina- 
tion ;  but  more  beautiful  is  the  short  poem  of  three 
stanzas,  '  Iseult  of  the  Mill,'  in  which  Mr.  Hewlett  adopts 
the  manner  of  folk-song. 

Artemision  :  Idylls  and  Songs  (1909)  followed  its  pre- 
cursor in  verse  at  a  distance  of  twelve  years,  but  the  poems 
contained  in  this  volume  were  written  1895-98,  and  this 
was  evidently  a  period  in  which  Mr.  Hewlett  gave  him- 
self almost  entirely  to  the  writing  of  verse,  before  popularity 


88  POETRY  [PART  i 

with  the  short  story  and  novel  led  him  in  another  direc- 
tion, for  the  three  dramatic  poems  of  The  Agonists  (1911) 
belong  in  date  of  composition  to  the  same  years.  Artemision 
opens  with  three  long  poems  on  classical  themes,  '  Leto's 
Child,'  '  The  Niobids  '  and  '  Latmos,'  followed  by  sonnets 
and  lyrics,  some  of  them  reprinted  from  Songs  and 
Meditations.  These  poems  do  not  serve  to  alter  a  con- 
viction that  Mr.  Hewlett's  primary  gift  is  not  that  of 
the  poet.  His  use  of  English  is  always  good,  but  pedantic, 
mannered  and  rigid,  yielding  no  nuances  of  thought  or 
phrase,  no  flashes  of  inspiration  or  poetic  felicity.  And 
his  ear  is  defective.  This  shortcoming  Mr.  Hewlett  has 
the  wit  to  see,  for  he  informs  us  in  Artemision  that  a 
number  of  the  poems  are  to  be  read  as  prose  that  the 
correct  stress  may  be  found  and  the  poems  resolve  them- 
selves into  verse.  The  same  warning  is  posted  in  the 
preface  to  The  Agonists,  and  we  are,  therefore,  on  our 
guard.  Whether  prose  may  be  scanned  by  the  method 
of  Professor  Saintsbury  is  a  question  that  may  be  left 
in  doubt,  but  all  will  agree  that  when  the  cadences  of 
prose  fall  into  the  metre  of  verse  we  are  reading  bad 
prose.  Nevertheless,  all  good  prose  has  its  ordered 
balance  of  rhythms.  The  greater  part  of  the  world's 
verse  is  written  to  strict  metres,  because  in  ordinary  speech 
the  stronger  the  emotion,  the  stronger  and  more  rapid  in 
recurrence  is  the  stress  of  the  voice,  and  poetry  is  the 
noblest  form  of  emotional  utterance.  But  verse  that  only 
appears  as  verse  when  read  as  prose  is  another  matter 
and  a  strange  anomaly.  The  only  consequence  of  reading 
Mr.  Hewlett's  verse  on  his  own  principles  is  that  it  resolves 
itself  into  bad  and  weak  prose. 

"  Being  so  fair  thou  art  holy 
Even  as  Beatrice  is, 
Sister-torches  of  God, 
Twin  pastures  untrod., 
Handmaidens  meek  and  lowly, 
Consecrate  priestesses, 
To  heaven  dedicate  wholly." 

(Donna  c  gentil — .) 

What  is  this  but  staccato  and  jerky  prose  ?  It  only  stirs 
a  regret  that  phrases  so  good  should  be  so  ill  conjoined. 


CHAP,  m]     PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  89 

In  The  Agonists,  to  which,  fortunately,  he  has  been  able 
to  give  more  time,  Mr.  Hewlett  is  more  successful,  and 
there  is  a  music  in  his  verse  though  we  read  it  in  the  dis- 
passionate temper  of  prose.  The  three  dramatic  poems 
of  the  volume,  written  in  irregular  and  constantly  diver- 
sified forms  of  rhymed  and  unrhymed  verse,  are,  in  force, 
flexibility  and  human  interest,  the  highest  attainment  of 
Mr.  Hewlett  in  poetry.  Further,  these  three  poems  have 
a  philosophical  basis  and  lead  up  to  an  epilogue,  not  yet 
published,  on  the  passion  of  Christ,  wherein  it  will  be 
shown  that  "  the  divine  qualities  can  only  mate  with 
human  faculty  in  the  ideal  presented  to  mankind  in  the 
Incarnate  God  of  the  Christians."  '  Minos,  King  of 
Crete,'  '  Ariadne  in  Naxos '  and  '  The  Death  of  Hyp- 
polytus  '  illustrate  the  failure  of  the  ancient  concepts  of 
the  relation  of  God  to  Man,  in  that  the  essential  qualities 
of  God — Power,  Love  and  Knowledge — were  never  com- 
bined in  the  individual.  The  problem  of  the  poems  is, 
in  brief,  the  question  tortured  by  Browning  into  many 
shapes — the  relationship  of  love  and  knowledge  in  the 
individual  life. 

Helen  Redeemed  (1913)  is  another  of  Mr.  Hewlett's 
poems  based  on  a  classic  subject,  this  time  written  in 
heroics,  but  of  so  rough  a  kind  that  for  many  lines  the 
words  stagger,  trot  and  amble  in  helpless  confusion.  It 
may  be  possible  to  find  an  iambic  scansion  for  such  a 
line  as 

"  Shed ;  nor  yet  so  the  end  for  Here  cried/' 
or 

"  His  hand  over  the  crupper,,  of  such  girth/' 

but  only  with  violence  to  word-stresses.  Nevertheless, 
this  epic  in  eleven  stages  of  Troy's  fall  and  the  redemp- 
tion of  Helen  through  a  second  treachery  is  eloquent ; 
and  in  the  later  passages  of  the  poem  Mr.  Hewlett  uses 
his  metre  with  a  better  grace  and  skill.  But,  in  all,  the 
poem  is  monotonous  as  nearly  all  poetry  is  fated  to  be 
which  translates  the  poet  to  an  age  so  distant  that  the 
characters  can  never  be  other  than  super-human  and 
meaningless.  The  poem  as  a  whole  but  serves  to  confirm 
the  impression  we  gain  from  all  Mr.  Hewlett's  earlier 
volumes  of  verse.  Knowledge,  thought,  independence 


90  POETRY  [PART  i 

and  a  gift  of  eloquent  language  he  does  not  lack ;  but 
there  are  no  surprises,  no  unforgettable  beauties,  no 
magic  in  phrase  or  analogy,  which  mark  the  presence  of 
genius. 

If  Mr.  Hewlett  reminds  us  of  any  poets  before  him  it 
is  of  Browning  and  Meredith  ;  but  chiefly  of  the  latter. 
At  the  best,  however,  he  is  only  a  pale  reflection.  He  has 
nothing  of  Browning's  music  or  swift  onrush,  little  of 
Meredith's  originality  in  thought.  But  he  shares  some- 
thing with  Meredith's  manner  ;  and,  like  Browning,  he 
derives  the  substance  and  background  of  his  poetry  from 
Italy,  the  Renaissance  and  Pagan  mythology.  The 
preface  to  The  Agonists,  in  which  Mr.  Hewlett  makes  his 
profession  of  faith,  is  a  little  surprising,  for  nearly  all  his 
poetry  suggests  a  pagan  temper,  a  dislike  of  asceticism 
and  a  flirting  with  the  voluptuous.  Beyond  this  it  is 
true,  however,  that  we  can  detect  the  detached  and 
impersonal  nature.  And  therefore,  on  the  whole,  he  has 
only  reached  true  poetry  in  the  philosophical  series  of  The 
Agonists,  a  poetry  which  flows  strongly,  is  permeated  with 
colour  and  steeped  in  knowledge  of  classic  lore  and  myth. 

In  1875,  Mr.  Charles  Montagu  Doughty,  then  a  young 
man,  wandered  up  and  down  the  wastes  and  wilds  of 
Arabia,  cut  off  from  all  intercourse  with 
Charles  Montagu  Europeans,  to  emerge  with  a  knowledge 
Doughty,  b.  1843.  of  Arabia  and  her  inhabitants  given  to 
no  man  of  his  time.  Ten  years  after 
his  reappearance  he  published  his  Travels  in  Arabia 
Deserta  (1888)  in  two  large  volumes  which  showed  that 
he  was  not  only  the  explorer,  but  the  master  of  a  style 
at  once  precise  and  splendidly  imaginative.  Arabia 
Deserta  is  no  book  of  dry-as-dust  inquiry  into  ethno- 
graphy and  archaeology,  it  belongs  to  literature  by  virtue 
of  a  prose,  clearly  chiselled,  poetically  imaginative  and 
rich  with  a  vocabulary  of  potent  words.  The  style  recalls 
English  prose  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and  the  style 
of  his  blank-verse  epic,  The  Dawn  in  Britain  (1906),  also 
derives  from  English  of  the  same  period.  The  snipped 
idiom  and  vocabulary  of  modern  prose  Mr.  Doughty 
found  insufficient  to  his  needs  :  and  the  style  of  his  epic 
is  also  a  deliberate  artifice,  archaic  in  phrase,  idiom  and 
construction,  borrowing  directly  from  Milton  and  Spenser. 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  91 

But  he  has  little  share  in  the  romanticism  of  either  poet. 
More  definitively  than  any  living  English  poet  Mr.  Doughty 
stands  for  an  intellectual  and  classical  reaction  against 
Victorian  feeling.  And  difficult  though  it  may  be  to  read 
The  Dawn  in  Britain  as  a  whole  (as  difficult  as  an  entire 
reading  of  the  Faerie  Queene)  it  leaves  an  impress  of  sheer 
intellectual  force  in  which  it  is  only  surpassed  by  one 
other  poem  of  the  day — The  Dynasts. 

The  dawn  of  which  Mr.  Doughty  writes  is  the  advent 
of  Christianity  in  Britain,  and  in  his  poem  he  attempts 
to  paint  a  picture  of  our  country  in  the  third  century 
as  realistic  as  the  drawing  of  Arabia  in  his  prose  volumes. 
He  aims  at  the  intellectual  realisation  of  a  past  epoch, 
avoiding  the  sentimentalism  of  the  Arthurian  legends  as 
they  are  found  in  the  Victorian  poets.  Perhaps  the  clearest 
and  most  obvious  example  of  his  intellectualism  is  his 
sedulous  and  painstaking  rejection  of  the  pathetic  fallacy. 
He  is  guiltless  of  view-hunting  or  landscape-painting,  that 
vice  so  severely  lashed  by  Carlyle  and  Ruskin  who  sinned 
in  common  against  their  own  theory.  But  Mr.  Doughty 
notes  the  outer  face  of  nature  only  in  incidental  and  brief 
rubrics.  One  or  two  examples  will  illustrate  the  objectively 
intellectual  character  of  his  landscape-painting,  and  its 
wonderful  truthfulness. 

"  And  now  springs  the  late  dawn ;  sun's  glistering  beams 

Clipping  the  hoary  boughs,  like  golden  hairs  "  (i.  62), 
or 

"By  fenny  brooks,  amongst  brown  bramble-brakes"  (v.  76). 

He  hardly  tries  to  paint  an  imaginative  picture,  even 
briefly.  Commonly  he  writes  of  natural  phenomena  in  a 
manner  purely  intellectual — 

"  How  sweet  the  Spring-tide,  in  far  island-Britain, 
When  soars  the  heavenly  lark,  with  merry  throat ! "  (vi.  95). 

The  English,  or  "^Anglecism  "  as  he  would  call  it,  of 
Mr.  Doughty  is,  as  nearly  as  may  be,  the  English  of 
Spenser.  It  is  his  belief  that  to  Spenser,  above  any 
English  poet,  was  given  the  "  golden  intimate  tongue  " 
of  the  muses.  And  outside  English  poetry  Mr.  Doughty's 
chief  debt  is  to  Homer.  But  the  spoken  word  comes 


92  POETRY  [PART  i 

before  literature  ;  and  the  best  workman  is  not  he  who 
refuses  to  use  the  tools  to  his  hand  because  they  are  not 
what  he  would  wish.  By  the  time  the  lesser  artist  has 
finished  pottering  with  his  tubes,  his  palette,  his  brushes 
and  his  lighting  the  true  painter  has  his  picture  finished. 
And  in  The  Datvn  in  Britain  we  are  as  often  conscious  of 
tools  and  the  business  of  getting  to  work  as  of  any  effect 
gained.  Bold  experiments  are  interesting  ;  but  to  walk 
across  the  river  of  the  epic  carefully  balanced  on  a  tight- 
rope of  words  serves  no  very  useful  purpose  in  life  or  art. 
Mr.  Doughty  has  not  succeeded  in  six  volumes  and  thirty 
thousand  lines  in  writing  a  great  epic  ;  he  has  experi- 
mented in  an  extraordinarily  interesting  manner  with  an 
ancient  garment  of  speech.  But  the  recurring  use  of 
"  sith,"  "  ben,"  "  sheen,"  "  wox,"  and  other  archaisms 
becomes  as  monotonous  and  unedifying  as  the  larding  of 
conversation  with  one  or  two  tricks  of  slang.  Mr.  Doughty' s 
poem  can  only  be  read,  if  read,  as  an  interesting  experi- 
ment in  reaction. 

Examples  must  be  rare  of  the  author  who  begins  as  a 
poet  so  late  in  life.  Mr.  Doughty  was  over  sixty  when  he 
published  The  Dawn  in  Britain,  but  after  this  beginning 
he  has  continued  to  write  at  astonishing  length  and  with 
surprising  speed.  In  Adam  Cast  Forth  (1908),  a  sacred 
drama  in  five  acts  of  blank  verse,  archaic  vocabulary  is 
much  less  in  evidence,  although  the  texture  of  Mr. 
Doughty's  "  Anglecism  "  is  still  that  of  Spenser  and  the 
Elizabethans.  His  intimate  knowledge  of  Arabia  has 
enabled  him  to  give  a  Semitic  atmosphere  to  the  whole 
poem.  But  the  most  readable  of  his  writings  is  The 
Cliffs  (1909),  a  long  blank-verse  drama  which  recalls,  in 
structure  and  in  the  use  of  supernatural  machinery,  Mr. 
Hardy's  Dynasts,  and  it  would  probably  never  have  been 
written  without  inspiration  from  that  source.  The  style 
of  the  poem  is  still  archaic  in  its  inversions  and  its  omis- 
sion of  particles,  but,  as  the  time  is  present  day,  Mr. 
Doughty  wisely  shelves  much  of  his  Spenserian  affectation. 
He  chooses  for  his  theme  a  dominant  obsession  of  the 
English  mind — invasion  by  Germany,  and  especially 
invasion  by  air.  The  poem  opens  with  a  long  monologue 
by  John  Hobbe,  a  Crimean  veteran  who  tends  sheep  on 
the  cliffs  of  East  Anglia.  His  soliloquy  is  scarcely  cut 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  93 

short,  but,  at  least,  curtailed  in  length,  by  the  sudden 
landing  of  a  Prussian  ('  Persic  '  is  Mr.  Doughty's  word) 
airship  containing  two  German  officers  and  a  machinist, 
who  have  come  to  spy  out  the  land  with  a  view  to  im- 
mediate invasion.  This  they  proceed  to  do  by  discoursing 
at  large,  in  the  manner  of  the  halfpenny  papers,  on  the 
effeminacy,  apathy  and  carelessness  of  the  English.  Old 
Hobbe  springs  out  upon  them  and  tries  to  rend  their 
balloon  with  his  crook.  They  run  him  through  the  body 
and  depart  in  haste,  leaving  maps  and  other  trifles  on 
the  grass.  In  the  second  part  supernatural  beings  are 
introduced,  Sirion,  Truth,  great  JEons,  and  a  company 
of  elves  who  dilate,  before  the  ruined  edifice  of  Britannia's 
temple,  on  the  low  estate  to  which  English  politics  and 
patriotism  have  fallen.  In  Part  III  the  coastguards  dis- 
cover the  body  of  Hobbe  and  the  papers  left  by  the  Persies 
and  return  to  rouse  England  with  the  news  of  invasion. 
In  Part  IV  the  temple  of  Britannia  is  seen  re-edified  as 
the  result  of  the  revival  of  patriotism,  supernatural  beings 
again  appear  with  the  ghosts  of  the  great  English  departed, 
and  two  foreign  ghosts — Napoleon  and  Joan  of  Arc.  In 
Part  V  Claybourne  village  is  discovered,  guarded  and 
patrolled  by  sentries,  one  or  two  English  successes  are 
related,  and  in  conclusion  the  vicar  of  the  village  reads 
a  long  patriotic  song  which  is  taken  up  in  unison  by  the 
soldiers  and  all  present  standing  round  the  colours.  The 
scheme  of  the  poem  is  grandiose,  even  to  the  verge  of 
the  ludicrous,  yet  there  is  a  largeness  in  the  manner,  an 
intensity,  and  an  individual  note  which  check  the  smile. 
Despite  the  fact  that  Mr.  Doughty's  tirades  against  the 
decadence  of  England  are  fatally  suggestive  of  verse 
parodies  upon  the  leading  article  in  the  halfpenny  paper 
the  impression  left  by  the  poem  as  a  whole  is  of  substance 
and  breadth  in  conception.  And,  especially  in  Part  IV 
Mr.  Doughty  has  succeeded  in  writing  some  beautiful 
poetry  ;  though  he  can  also  write — 

"  The  Medical  Board  reported  me,  as  unfit  for 
further  service ;  and  with  a  pension,  for  my 
wounds,  I  was  discharged"- — • 

and  leave  the  reader  to  conjure  the  words  into  blank 
verse.  The  conclusion  we  are  driven  to  is  a  doubt  whether 


94  POETRY  [PART  i 

the  poem  would  ever  have  been  written  but  for  The 
Dynasts,  and  a  conviction  that  whereas  in  verse  and  magic 
of  language  both  largely  fail,  there  is  an  epic  strength  in  Mr. 
Hardy's  poem  to  which  Mr.  Doughty  never  wholly  attains. 

The  Clouds  (1912)  is  an  epilogue  to  The  Cliffs  in  fifteen 
blank-verse  poems.  The  epigraph  from  Spenser — "  All 
places  full  of  forraine  powers  " — gauges  the  state  of  Mr. 
Doughty' s  mind.  England  is  overrun  with  invading 
armies  till  the  colonies  come  to  her  assistance.  Mr. 
Doughty's  intention  is  good,  he  is  not  wholly  without 
the  gifts  of  the  prophet,  but  for  the  sake  of  his  poetry 
it  is  a  matter  for  regret  that  he  should  be  heavily  over- 
weighted with  his  theme.  His  immense  gain  in  poetry 
is  manifest  when  he  escapes  his  obsession,  as  in  his  picture 
of  the  elves'  banquet  in  The  Cliffs  and  also  in  the  splendid 
opening  passage  of  '  The  Muses'  Garden  '  in  The  Clouds, 
the  finest  example  of  his  writing  in  blank  verse. 

Mr.  Doughty's  poetry  in  the  whole  is  an  example  of 
varied  experiment  in  epic  and  literary  drama ;  and, 
further,  though  he  borrows  his  style  and  idiom  from  the 
most  romantic  of  poets,  his  temper  is  classical,  and  the 
interest  of  his  writings,  especially  of  The  Dawn  in  Britain, 
is  their  intellectual  and  objective  manner.  The  subjec- 
tive, romantic,  emotional  poetry  of  the  last  century  has 
never  touched  or  influenced  him  in  his  work.  In  the  poetry 
of  Mr.  Hardy,  Mr.  Doughty  and  John  Davidson  we  are 
never  tempted  to  recall  the  fact  that  Tennyson,  Swin- 
burne and  Rossetti  have  lived  and  written. 

The  use  of  dramatic  monologue  in  a  form  which  com- 
bined the  characteristics  of  subjective  lyricism  and  the 
objective  address  of  the  drama  was  a  marked  develop- 
ment of  poetry  in  the  last  century.  Both  Tennyson  and 
Browning  have  left  the  best  of  their  writing  in  this  form. 
The  constant  use  of  the  dramatic  monologue  was  a  natural 
outcome  of  the  introspectiveness  of  the  age  ;  it  was  used 
as  an  instrument  of  psychological  analysis  and  a  means  of 
making  poetry  a  more  individual  and  realistic  utterance 
of  the  heart.  But  Victorian  poetry  is  a  poetry  of  ideas, 
and  rarely  aims  at  concrete  realism.  Within  recent  years 
a  tendency  to  depart  from  purely  lyrical  forms  has  become 
marked  ;  a  poetry  of  crude  and  violent  realism,  typically 
illustrated  in  the  writing  of  Mr.  Masefield,  has  become 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  95 

the  mode,  and  there  are  but  few  living  poets  who  wholly 
escape  this  influence.  Poets  like  Mr.  Doughty,  Stephen 
Phillips,  Mr.  Binyon,  whose  talents  do  not  at  all  fit  them 
to  give  an  imitation  of  men  and  manners  in  their  time, 
have  yielded  in  some  degree  to  a  common  tendency.  Mr. 
Trench,  on  the  other  hand,  is  a  poet  of  genius  too  individual 
and  strong  to  write  but  in  his  own  way  ;  and  the  realism 
of  Mr.  Hardy  and  Mr.  A.  E.  Housman  is  another  matter 
and  peculiarly  their  own.  Perhaps  in  no  case  has  a  poet 
abandoned  romantic  lyricism  for  bald  realism  with  so 
little  loss  in  poetic  content  as  Mr.  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson. 

It  was  impossible  to  read  his  first  essays 
Wilfrid  Wilson  in  poetry  without  thinking  by  turns  of 
Gibson.  Tennyson,  Browning,  Swinburne,  Morris 

and  Rossetti.  It  may,  however,  be  said 
for  Mr.  Gibson  that  there  was  no  need  to  recall  Matthew 
Arnold  or  Coventry  Patmore.  His  first  volumes  of  verse 
belonged  to  the  stained-glass  tradition  of  Tennyson  and 
the  Pre-Raphaelites.  Between  1902  and  1905  he  pub- 
lished in  small  booklets  Urlyn  the  Harper,  The  Queen's 
Vigil,  The  Nets  of  Love  and  the  slightly  larger  collection 
of  The  Golden  Helm ;  and  in  The  Web  of  Life  (1908) 
he  returned  to  the  imitative  lyricism  of  these  early 
poems.  The  lyrics  of  these  collections  bear  witness  to  Mr. 
Gibson's  ready  gift  of  melody  and  song,  his  facile  com- 
mand of  metres,  his  power  to  employ  a  rich  vocabulary 
without  abuse,  but  they  are  imitative  and  wholly  lack 
the  impress  of  personality.  The  light  of  these  poems  is 
that  of  the  dim  cathedral  aisle  with  sunlight  burning 
upon  the  rich  colours  of  high  and  painted  windows.  Their 
most  strongly  marked  characteristic  is  a  passion  for  the 
wan  flame  and  the  red,  for  bright  and  glancing  colours, 
for  the  golden  haze  of  atmosphere.  And  this  passion  for 
colour  is  exemplified  notably  in  '  Faring  South,'  a  section 
of  Urlyn  the  Harper,  which  contains  in  short  two-stanza 
poems  of  observation  more  strength  and  individuality 
than  any  other  part  of  Mr.  Gibson's  volumes  of  collected 
lyric  verse.  His  pictures  in  '  The  Stone-breaker  '  and 
'  The  Ploughman,'  poems  of  this  section,  are  conceived  in 
colour.  The  ploughman's 

" .  .  .  white  share  spills  in  dust  the  hot  grey  soil," 


96  POETRY  [PART  i 

the  washer  bending  at  the  stream  is  "  white-capped,  red- 
armed,"  the  harvester's  face  and  throat  are  "  copper 
glowing,"  the  stone-breaker's  arms  are  "  brown  "  and  the 
flints  he  cracks  "  dark-moulded,"  the  country  wife's  face 
burns  "  red-golden  "  beneath  her  "  snow-white  "  cap. 
The  sureness  of  Mr.  Gibson's  eye  and  the  fidelity  of  his 
painting  in  these  few  short  poems  differentiates  them  from 
the  others  ;  but  his  lyric  and  narrative  poems  show  little 
writing  that  is  personal  to  the  author. 

Latterly  Mr.  Gibson  has  executed  a  complete  volte-face, 
and  has  written  in  The  Stonefolds  (1907),  On  the  Threshold 
(1907),  Daily  Bread  (1910)  and  Fires  (1912),  poetic  drama 
and  dramatic  poems,  objective  and  unshrinkingly  realistic 
in  manner.  Queens,  forlorn  damsels,  knights,  esquires, 
jousts,  tourneys  and  scenes  of  mediaeval  romance  and 
story  had  been  his  themes,  but  now  he  chooses  for  the 
subjects  of  his  poems  cottagers,  shepherds,  ferrymen,  pit- 
men, printers,  carpenters,  the  unemployed,  he  dramatises 
the  primitive  hates  and  loves  of  uncultured  people,  their 
struggle  for  daily  bread,  the  courage  with  which  they  face 
adversity  and  pain,  their  motives,  their  virtues  and  their 
sins.  In  the  first  two  series  of  dramatic  poems  he  uses  a 
strong  and  flowing  blank  verse.  As  an  instrument  of 
vigorous  and  straightforward  expression  it  would  be 
difficult  to  overpraise  it.  Its  music  is  not  strikingly  varied, 
it  is  plain  and  affects  no  ornament,  but  it  is  neither  end- 
stopt  nor  wearisome  to  the  ear,  and  admirable  for  the 
purposes  to  which  Mr.  Gibson  puts  it.  The  early  volumes 
gave  little  promise  of  any  dramatic  instinct  in  the  author, 
but  these  short  dramatic  poems,  containing  only  two  to 
four  characters  apiece,  are  instinct  with  dramatic  feeling, 
human  emotions  and  individual  characterisation.  They 
contain  more  humanity  and  more  true  drama  than  much 
in  poetic  drama — Stephen  Phillips  and  Mr.  Binyon,  for 
example — which  has  appeared  on  the  stage. 

The  desire  to  come  nearer  to  the  heart  of  reality  prompted 
Mr.  Gibson  to  go  further,  and  in  the  dramatic  poems  of 
Daily  Bread  blank  verse  is  eschewed  for  ejaculatory  verse 
in  short  unrhymed  lines.  His  subjects,  taken  from  common 
life,  are  the  same,  and  he  loses  nothing  in  dramatic  power ; 
but  his  handling  of  blank  verse  was  so  good  that  it  is  a 
pity  he  abandoned  it  for  the  curious  and  trying  versification 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  97 

of  these  poems.  In  Fires  he  writes  again  of  everyday  and 
common  life,  but  for  the  most  part  in  rhyming  octo- 
syllables with  variations  and  irregularities.  Some  of  these 
poems,  like  '  Flannan  Isle,'  have  a  macabre  and  eerie 
twist,  some,  like  '  The  Stone,'  are  grim  ;  but  in  concentra- 
tion of  power  and  psychical  weirdness  the  best  of  the 
tales,  '  The  Old  Man,'  is  also  one  of  the  shortest.  In  this 
poem  Mr.  Gibson  has  won  astonishing  success  in  creating 
an  atmosphere  of  ghostly  creepiness. 

The  realism  of  Mr.  Gibson  is  not  the  impressionistic 
realism  of  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  and  other  poets  in  the 
'nineties,  but  the  broader  realism  of  recent  years,  inspired 
with  a  faith  in  God  and  human  nature.  These  poems 
may  be  regarded  as  anticipatory  of  the  attempts  of  Mr. 
Masefield  to  write  passionately  and  violently  of  rough 
and  common  men.  They  illustrate  a  tendency,  manifested 
recently  in  poets,  dramatists  and  novelists,  to  give  an 
appearance  of  strength  to  their  writing  by  treating  baldly 
or  noisily  the  passions  and  emotions  of  untutored  minds. 
In  noise  and  blatancy  nobody  can  claim  to  out- 
rival Mr.  John  Masefield,  whose  example  has  reacted 
for  evil  upon  smaller  writers  in  proportion  to  the 

indubitably  high  gifts  he  possesses  as  a 
John  Masefield.  poet.  His  experiences  as  a  wanderer  in 

early  life  led  him  to  begin  with  the 
nautical  poems,  written  in  sailor  speech,  of  Salt-water 
Ballads  (1902)  and  Ballads  (1903).  These  ballads  remind 
us  of  Mr.  Kipling's  soldier  poems  and  the  contents  of 
The  Seven  Seas,  though  Mr.  Masefield' s  melodies  are  not, 
as  a  rule,  so  naive  and  simple  as  Mr.  Kipling's.  Unfor- 
tunately, even  in  his  early  poems,  Mr.  Masefield  confuses, 
as  he  does  later  with  great  success,  crudity  and  brutality 
with  strength.  Indifference  to  the  death  of  comrades  is  a 
frequent  topic  of  the  Salt-water  Ballads,  and  it  is  not  a 
subject  which  grows  more  pleasing  with  repetition.  Nor 
does  Mr.  Masefield  echo  the  patriotism  of  Sir  Henry 
Newbolt's  sea-songs  :  his  pirates,  buccaneers  and  deck-hands 
on  the  dirty  tramp  steamer  declare  in  their  own  tongue  the 
wonders  of  sea  and  storm.  Among  the  best  of  the  poems  in 
sailor  speech  are  '  One  of  the  Bo' sun's  Yarns  '  and  '  Cape 
Horn  Gospel ' ;  '  Captain  Stratton'  s  Fancy '  is  among 
the  best  of  drinking-songs  ;  and  of  poems  not  in  the 


98  POETRY  [PART  I 

colloquial  of  the  deck  '  A  Valediction '  and  the  fine 
'  Seekers  '  are  noteworthy.  In  these  poems  Mr.  Mase- 
field  has,  at  least,  caught  the  spirit  of  the  high  seas,  but 
Mr.  Kipling  has  written  better  ballads  of  the  sea  in 
cockney  and  rough  slang,  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  two  or  three 
sea-songs  which  outdistance  anything  of  Mr.  Masefield's. 

It  was  not  till  he  had  been  writing  poetry  for  ten  years 
that  he  began  to  produce  in  the  English  Review  those  long 
poems,  full  of  strange  oaths  and  turbulent  rhythms, 
which  provoked  either  hearty  admiration  or  scoffing 
ridicule.  On  the  one  hand  he  was  hailed  as  the  greatest 
genius  in  modern  poetry,  on  the  other  held  up  to  oppro- 
brium as  one  who  dragged  poetry  in  the  mire  of  coarse 
speech ;  and  he  was  admirably  parodied  by  Mr.  J.  Ceilings 
Squire,  who  had  little  to  do  but  reproduce  the  original 
with  slight  unfaithfulness.  In  Mr.  Masefield's  poems  we 
have  the  culmination  of  that  disregard  for  form  and  the 
principle  of  beauty  in  all  things  sadly  predicted  by  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson.  But  this  does  not  conclude  the  whole 
matter.  If  a  large  part  of  Mr.  Masefield's  later  poems 
degenerates  into  slap-dash  rhetoric  in  the  dialect  of  the 
hamlet  and  the  dirty  slum,  the  real  beauty  of  long  passages, 
the  vigour  of  utterance  and  conception  in  the  whole  can- 
not be  denied.  This  is  more  especially  true  of  Daffodil 
Fields  (1913),  which  has  passages  of  great  beauty  in  its 
description  of  English  country  scenes.  The  River  (1913) 
which  followed  it  has  lost  the  force  and  raciness  of  The 
Everlasting  Mercy  (1911)  and  The  Widow  in  the  Bye- 
street  (1912),  without  any  compensations.  Of  these  realistic 
novels  in  verse  the  best  as  a  complete  poem  is  Dauber 
(1912),  the  chronicle  of  a  voyage  and  the  story  of  a  youth 
who  dreamed  of  becoming  a  great  painter.  It  is  less 
violent  than  its  immediate  predecessors,  more  coherent 
in  narrative,  but  little  broken  in  upon  by  prosy  moralising 
and  only  slightly  disfigured  by  rhyme  for  rhyme's  sake. 
And  the  description  of  storms  and  icy  winds  off  Cape 
Horn  is  one  of  the  greatest  things  of  its  kind  in  verse — 
the  utter  desolation  and  wild  abandon  of  sea  and  sky  are 
wonderfully  vivid  in  the  telling. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  these  rough-and-ready  poems 
are  a  form  of  literature  alive  in  every  line,  springing 
unthought  from  a  sensitive  nature  responsive  to  every 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  99 

influence  of  life  :  their  weakness  lies  in  the  unfortunate 
self-consciousness  of  Mr.  Masefield  in  his  attempts  to  gain 
strength  by  crude  violences  to  language  and  rhythm.  In 
Daffodil  Fields  the  metre  is  often  hideouly  uncouth.  The 
use  of  foul  words  and  the  realistic  description  of  brutal 
scenes  lends  no  additional  vigour  to  the  poems  ;  for  Mr. 
Masefield  writes  far  better  when  he  forgets  these  things. 
And,  further,  the  passages  of  religious  and  worldly-wise 
comment  interpolated  in  the  narrative  are,  as  often  as 
not,  ludicrous  in  their  context.  It  is  incredible  that  the 
converted  sinner  of  The  Everlasting  Mercy  should  move 
with  facile  fluency  from  telling  with  gusto  the  story  of  his 
evil  life  to  playing  his  own  chorus  in  pious  refrain.  And 
the  interpolations  of  The  Widow  in  the  Bye-street  are  even 
more  incongruous.  It  is  difficult  to  read  with  patience 
this  warning  against  wicked  and  designing  beauty — 

"  So  tea  was  made,  and  down  they  sat  to  drink ; 
O  the  pale  beauty  sitting  at  the  board  ! 
There  is  more  death  in  women  than  we  think, 
There  is  much  danger  in  the  souls  adored, 
The  white  hands  bring  the  poison  and  the  cord, 
Death  has  a  lodge  in  lips  as  red  as  cherries, 
Death  has  a  mansion  in  the  yew-tree  berries." 

Ancient  maxims,  wholly  out  of  place,  are  here  introduced 
by  violence  ;  they  serve  no  purpose  of  beauty  or  moral 
appeal.  And  the  passage  quoted  illustrates  a  persistent 
fault  of  these  slap-dash  poems— the  subservience  of  matter 
and  sense  to  rhyme.  The  only  business  of  the  fourth  and 
fifth  lines  is  to  provide  rhymes  to  "  board."  It  is  no 
universal  truth  that  "  there  is  much  danger  in  the  souls 
adored";  and  the  statement  interests  us  as  much  as  if 
Mr.  Masefield  said  "  there  is  much  danger  in  going  to  sea 
in  ships."  It  simply  was  not  worth  saying  ;  and  line 
after  line,  passage  after  passage,  was  not  worth  writing. 
Ugly  and  unnecessary  faults  abound.  The  great  merit  of 
these  poems,  doubtless,  is  their  sincere  whole-heartedness 
and  their  real  beauty  when  the  poet  forgets  men  and 
writes  of  nature.  If  Coleridge's  dictum  that  poetry  should 
equally  give  pleasure  in  the  parts  as  in  the  whole  be  applied 
as  a  test  Mr.  Masefield's  poems  fail.  Much  of  his  narrative 
writing  in  verse  is  ugly,  noisy,  violent ;  he  is  not,  with  all 


100  POETRY  [PART  i 

his  display  of  realism,  as  true  to  simple  and  essential 
humanity  as,  to  give  but  one  example  of  a  tuneful  poet, 
Mr.  A.  E.  Housman,  and  dramatically  these  poems  are 
not  as  convincing  as  Mr.  W.  W.  Gibson's  essays  in  a 
similar  kind  of  writing.  All  that  Mr.  Masefield  has 
hitherto  written  leaves  us  with  the  impression  that  he 
has  not  wholly  found  himself.  He  possesses  a  strongly 
human,  full-blooded  and  sincerely  religious  view  of  life, 
he  makes  the  reader  conscious  of  the  tragic  mystery  of 
existence,  of  life's  ethical  claims,  of  the  largeness  of  man's 
inheritance.  In  this  he  shares  something  with  the  in- 
spiriting influence  belonging  to  the  writing  of  Meredith, 
although  his  ideas  are,  by  comparison,  wanting  in 
originality.  And  it  is  curious  that  he  has  never  given  him- 
self forth  as  well  or  as  completely  in  imaginative  work 
as  in  a  short  book  of  prose  criticism.  His  critique  of 
Shakespeare  (1911)  is  the  most  original  thing  Mr.  Mase- 
field has  written,  the  book  in  which  he  says  more  than 
he  says  elsewhere  and  expresses  more  of  himself.  In  a 
small  book  of  less  than  two  hundred  widely  printed  pages 
he  has  succeeded  in  saying  something  fresh,  although  he 
writes  after  nearly  two  hundred  years  busy  with  com- 
mentary upon  Shakespeare. 

Among   living   English   poets   Mr.   Masefield   and   Mr. 
Lascelles   Abercrombie   have   gained   a  reputation   more 

rapidly  than  others.  A  few  years  ago 
Lascelles  Aber-  they  were  virtually  unknown :  to-day 
crombie,  b.  1881.  their  names  carry  what  appears  to  many 

an  established  fame  in  the  English  world 
of  letters.  And,  despite  much  dissimilarity,  a  certain 
likeness  in  method  and  ideal  may  be  discovered  in 
their  work.  In  the  roughness  and  crude  energy  of  Mr. 
Abercrombie' s  '  Blind  '  and  '  Mary  :  A  Legend  of  the  '45  ' 
there  is  much  to  remind  us  of  the  series  of  poems  Mr. 
Masefield  inaugurated  with  The  Everlasting  Mercy.  But 
whereas  Mr.  Masefield  inspires  us  with  the  belief  that  he 
writes  currente  calamo,  Mr.  Abercrombie' s  force  is  obviously 
only  won  at  the  cost  of  protracted  labour — the  similes, 
metaphors,  vocabulary  are  often  far-fetched  and  elaborated 
with  difficulty.  And  this  appearance  of  strain  and  effort 
is  a  failing  which  inheres  not  only  in  those  poems  in  which 
we  can  point  a  parallelism  with  Mr.  Masefield,  but  in 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          101 

others,  more  in  number,  which  may  be  described  as 
metaphysical  rather  than  realistic  or  romantic  in  char- 
acter. 

The  Interludes  and  Poems  (1908)  contained  the  realistic 
drama  '  Blind,'  four  metaphysical  dialogue  poems,  '  The 
New  God,'  '  The  Fool's  Adventure,'  '  An  Escape '  and 
'  Peregrinus,'  and  some  shorter  pieces.  Following  upon 
this  volume  came  the  delicate  and  truly  beautiful  Mary 
and  the  Bramble  (1910),  and  the  over-long  and  pointless 
Sale  of  Saint  Thomas  (1911).  In  Emblems  of  Love  (1912), 
the  largest  collection  of  verse  he  has  hitherto  published, 
Mr.  Abercrombie  continued  to  treat,  either  realistically 
or  metaphysically,  questions  of  sex  and  love.  The  two 
finest  poems  of  the  volume,  '  Vashti '  and  '  Judith,'  are 
based  on  scriptural  themes. 

Mr.  Abercrombie  possesses  a  wide  vocabulary  and  one 
peculiar  to  himself ;  and  this  has  led  many  to  regard 
him  as  a  strong  poet  who  expresses  himself  with  a  ready 
gusto.  But  the  more  closely  his  poetry  is  examined  the 
more  definitely  it  appears  as  literary  in  its  inspiration 
and  wrought  out  with  pains  and  difficulty.  He  often 
uses  daring  and  splendid  images.  When  he  writes  of 

"the  world 

From  the  soft  delicate  floor  of  grass  to  those 
Rafters  of  light  and  hanging  cloths  of  stars/' 

or  again  writes — 

"  And  then  a  hundred  beasts  of  wind  leap  howling, 
And  pounce  upon  the  roof  with  worrying  paws/' 

we  do  not  easily  forget  metaphors  so  extravagantly 
splendid.  But  as  often  Mr.  Lascelles  Abercrombie  becomes 
merely  grandiose  in  his  efforts.  He  can  write  meaningless 
nonsense.  Thus  he  tells  of  the  elder  gods,  degraded  to  a 
place  of  darkness,  how 

"  Often  their  drowned  agony  shall  heave 
Large  sobs  from  under,  till  the  shoulder'd  pit 
Plunges,,  the  blind  cumber  of  the  useless  mire." 

The  clumsy  words  and  preposterously  awkward  phrasing 
in  these  lines  almost  entirely  obscure  the  image  present 
to  the  poet's  mind.  Again  in — 


102  POETRY  [PART  i 

"  You  hear  the  chime  of  frowning  lipping  water 
Trodden  to  chattering  falsehood  by  the  keels 
Of  kings'  happiness/' 

he  can  be  guilty  of  grotesque  confusion  in  metaphor. 
And  these  are  but  examples  that  may  easily  be  matched. 
Mr.  Abercrombie's  thought  is  derivative  and  indirect; 
his  style  is  a  cultivated  artifice.  Of  all  the  younger  poets 
of  to-day  he  has  the  most  definitely  metaphysical  bent 
of  mind.  He  is  thus  often  led  into  regions  where  poetry 
is  singularly  ineffective.  Like  Donne,  of  whom  he  some- 
times reminds  us,  he  is  the  better  poet  in  his  lapses  of 
memory,  when  he  forgets  conceits,  artifice  and  meta- 
physic.  Decidedly  Mr.  Abercrombie  is  in  the  succession 
of  Donne  when  he  writes — 

"  Yea,  Love,  we  are  thine,  the  liturgy  of  thee, 

Thy  thought's  golden  and  glad  name, 
The  mortal  conscience  of  immortal  glee, 

Love's  zeal  in  Love's  own  glory." 

This  metaphysical  bent  is  most  clearly  exhibited  in  his 
Interludes  and  Poems,  and  of  poems  in  this  vein  '  Pere- 
grinus  '  and  '  The  Fool's  Adventure  '  are  the  most  success- 
ful. But  the  thought  could  often  be  expressed  in  good 
prose  better  than  in  Mr.  Abercrombie's  roughly-handled, 
unrhyming  lines.  Only  too  frequently  his  verse  pounds 
and  staggers,  and  we  remember  Dr.  Johnson's  curt  dis- 
missal of  those  who  thought  that  not  to  write  prose  was 
most  certainly  to  write  poetry.  It  is  a  misfortune  that 
Mr.  Abercrombie  should  strive  to  achieve  a  stucco  grandeur 
when  he  can,  as  in  Mary  and  the  Bramble,  write  with  a 
beautiful  simplicity.  In  '  Judith  '  and  '  Vashti,'  further- 
more, there  are  arresting  passages  of  imaginative  poetry  ; 
and  the  fine  ode  on  '  Indignation  '  is  so  wrought  that  it 
exalts  the  ethical  consciousness,  despite  its  crude  and 
halting  rhythm.  But  too  large  a  part  of  his  verse  reflects 
a  process  of  purely  intellectual  manufacture. 

Happily  he  succeeded  in  Deborah  (1913),  a  blank- verse 
drama  of  four  acts,  in  shaking  off  pedantries  and  affecta- 
tions. The  scene  is  in  humble  life,  a  fishing  village  on 
river  marshes  by  the  sea.  A  plague  sweeps  the  village. 
Saul,  the  pilot,  forces  the  doctor  to  visit  first  his  son, 
Barnaby,  and  thus  saves  his  life  ;  but  the  delay  results 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          103 

in  the  death  of  David,  Deborah's  lover.  Nevertheless, 
Deborah  forgives,  and,  after  the  death  of  Saul,  cherishes 
Barnaby,  who  indirectly  cost  her  the  life  of  her  lover. 
The  play  closes  with  the  tragic  death  of  Miriam,  David's 
younger  sister,  who  bears  an  illegitimate  child  to  Barnaby. 
In  the  last  act  Miriam  thinks  she  hears  the  Gabriel  hounds 
howling  in  the  wind  for  her  baby's  soul.  The  irony  of 
circumstance,  after  the  manner  of  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy, 
is  the  motif  of  this  poem,  incomparably  the  simplest  and 
most  powerful  Mr.  Abercrombie  has  yet  written.  In  place 
of  tortured  involutions  he  here  uses  a  verse  that  is  direct 
and  rapid  in  movement. 

But,  all  in  all,  Mr.  Abercrombie  appears  to  be  an  example 
of  the  man  who  writes  poetry  not  because  he  must,  but. 
because  he  has  something  to  say  and  has  sufficient  intel- 
lectual force  to  compass  by  purposeful  industry  a  certain 
range  of  poetic  expression. 


§2 

In  everyday  life  we  fight  a  guerilla  warfare  with  time, 
harassed  by  the  knowledge  that  while  we  are  mortal  our 
enemy,  in  Dr.  Johnson's  phrase,  is  "  not  subject  to 
casualities."  But  in  the  perspective  of  the  past  the  malice 
of  time  is  forgotten,  our  petty  defeats  lose  their  bitter- 
ness, and  time  appears  as  an  old  friend  who  only  of  late 
has  become  unfriendly,  trapping  and  waylaying  us  in  our 
footsteps.  For  memory  is  an  artist  who  keeps  in  mind 
none  save  the  sunny  hours,  omitting  all  that  is  inessential 
to  the  good  of  life.  And  the  common  instinct  of  man  does 
likewise,  keeping  only  the  poetry  and  literature  which  is 
the  same  in  all  ages,  not  merely  good  for  the  generation 
in  which  it  was  written.  At  the  beginning  of  the  twenty- 
first  century,  in  all  probability,  the  greater  number  of 
the  poets  named  in  this  book,  with  all  their  poems,  will 
only  be  matter  for  comparative  study  by  the  literary 
expert.  Many  he  will  not  trouble  to  include  in  his  history 
of  English  literature  in  the  twentieth  century ;  others  will 
be  known  only  by  his  mention  of  them,  for  they  will  be 
read  by  nobody  ;  and  three  or  four,  perhaps,  will  yet  find 
readers.  But  our  loves  and  our  hopes  are  conditioned  by 


104  POETRY  [PART  i 

our  environment,  changing  with  each  generation  and  half- 
generation.  The  poet  of  the  eighteenth  century,  curtly 
dismissed  by  the  historian  of  to-day  with  a  bare  name  and 
date,  once  moved  a  few  hearts  more  strongly  than  poets 
of  the  same  period  whom  we  all  know  and  are  supposed 
to  read.  Nobody  now  cares  for  Bowles,  but  Bowles 
turned  Coleridge  to  poetry,  and  he  may  therefore  be 
accounted  part  author  of  the  Ancient  Mariner.  Thus 
those  who  live  and  write  to-day,  only  to  be  forgotten 
to-morrow,  are  creating  the  greater  songs  and  greater 
poets  of  the  future,  knowing  not  how  or  when.  As  Bowles 
inspired  Coleridge  and  brought  Wordsworth  to  a  halt 
on  Westminster  Bridge,  so  poets  not  for  all  time  but 
of  an  age  are  for  us  of  that  age  ;  for  we  cannot  dis- 
criminate with  the  wisdom  and  wide  knowledge  of  those 
who  are  happy  in  coming  after  us.  Time  quickly  hunts 
the  greater  part  of  printed  poetry  into  holes  and  corners  : 
and  it  is  most  natural  in  treating  of  other  poets  of  the  last 
twenty-five  years  to  follow  a  rough  chronological  method, 
gathering  into  this  section  poetry  belonging  in  part  to 
the  'nineties  and  in  part  to  this  century,  reserving  for  the 
next  section  poets  who  have  written  almost  wholly  within 
the  present  century. 

A  few  poets  have  yet  to  be  named  who  wrote  either  for 
the  Yellow  Book  or  for  Henley's  publications,  and  of  these 

Mr.  Laurence  Housman,  brother  of  the 
Laurence  Housman,  author  of  The  Shropshire  Lad,  deserves, 
b.  1867.  for  the  versatility  and  individuality  of 

his  work,  to  be  placed  first.  Mr.  A.  E. 
Housman  is  a  one  book  man  ;  his  brother  is  an  illustrator, 
a  poet,  a  novelist,  a  critic,  a  dramatist.  To  most  readers 
he  is  known  as  the  author  of  An  Englishwoman's  Love 
Letters  (1900),  one  of  the  poorest  and  least  characteristic 
of  his  writings.  A  number  of  his  illustrations,  chiefly  of  a 
grotesque  and  fanciful  kind,  appeared  in  the  Yellow 
Book ;  he  has  also  illustrated  Christina  Rossetti's  Goblin 
Market,  Meredith's  Jump  to  Glory  Jane  and  a  number 
of  his  own  books.  As  a  poet  he  is  to  be  counted  with 
the  inner  circle  of  the  mystics,  for  he  often  writes  in 
hieroglyphs  of  no  meaning  to  the  exoteric  mind.  He  has 
written  five  volumes  of  verse,  haunted  with  a  mystic 
consciousness  and  a  spirit  of  morbid  self-abasement  before 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          105 

the  thrones,  dominations  and  powers  of  this  universe, 
verse  which  places  him  at  the  opposite  pole  to  his  brother. 
The  severe  simplicity,  the  clear-eyed  stoicism  give  place 
to  cryptic  involvements  and  a  tangled  spirituality.  In 
wistfulness  and  melancholy  the  minds  of  the  brothers 
meet,  but  while  one  faces  life's  complexities  "  abashless," 
to  use  Francis  Thompson's  word,  the  younger  brother  is 
diffident  and  abashed  to  find  himself  alive.  The  note  of 
morbid  spiritual  wistfulness  makes  the  poems  of  Green 
Arras  (1896),  Rue  (1899)  and  Spikenard  (1898)  almost 
unreadable  save  to  the  mind  rightly  attuned.  The  atmo- 
sphere of  these  poems  is  that  of  Mediaeval  Catholicism, 
with  its  renunciation  of  the  passions  and  its  desire  for 
virgin  purity.  Spikenard  is  a  series  of  mystical  rhapsodies 
following  the  cycle  of  the  ecclesiastical  year  :  Rue  is  the 
simplest  and  most  intelligible  of  these  volumes.  Of  the 
technical  beauty  of  the  verse  there  can  be  no  question, 
though  Mr.  Laurence  Housman  does  not  rival  his  brother 
in  mastery  of  the  simplest  forms. 

In  Mendicant  Rhymes  (1906)  we  escape  to  a  healthier 
and  more  human  atmosphere,  emerging  from  the  ecstasies 
of  the  hermit's  cell  and  the  meditations  of  the  cloister  to 
the  open  air,  the  inn  and  the  battle-field.  And  when  in 
occasional  poems  he  reverts  to  doctrinal  mysticism  it  is 
with  new  power,  especially  in  the  opening  stanza  of  the 
impressive  '  Deus  Noster  Ignis  Consumens  ' — 

"  To  Him  be  praise  who  made 
Desire  more  fair  than  rest : 
Better  the  prayer  while  prayed, 
Than  the  attained  bequest. 
Man  goes  from  strength  to  strength, 
Fresh  from  each  draught  of  pain, 
Only  to  fail  at  length 
Of  heights  he  could  not  gain." 

The  emotional  strength  of  writing  like  this  raises  the 
poem  far  above  the  morbid,  obscure  and  tenebrous 
mysticism  of  the  earlier  volumes  :  it  is  like  escaping  from 
a  cave  of  shadowy  unrealities  to  a  bright  and  clear  sky. 
But  as  a  draughtsman  and  as  a  poet  Mr.  Laurence 
Housman  is  the  direct  descendant  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites ; 
and  the  greater  part  of  his  verse  writing  is  almost  unin- 
telligibly mystical.  This  is,  nevertheless,  far  from  being 


106  POETRY  [PART  i 

his  only  mood.  In  prose  he  can  be  realistic,  and  even 
effectively  satirical. 

Mr.  Richard  Le  Gallienne  is  in  poetry  ten  years  the 
senior   of   Mr.    Laurence   Housman,    but   he   traces   his 

ancestry  a  shorter  distance,  to  Oscar  Wilde, 
Richard  Le  and  thus  indirectly  he  has  a  distant  kinship 
Gallienne,  to  the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement.  In  other 

b.  1866.  respects  his  poetry  has  no  resemblance  to 

that  of  Mr.  Housman,  save  in  a  slender 
strain  of  mysticism  and  a  dreamy  detachment  from 
practical  life.  Unfortunately  Mr.  Le  Gallienne,  struggling 
to  find  himself  in  the  midst  of  uncongenial  surroundings, 
was  caught  in  the  whirl  of  the  aesthetic  movement  and 
swept  off  his  feet.  He  received  an  indifferent  education 
and  from  school  was  passed  on  to  a  business  office  in 
Liverpool.  But  he  was  born  with  an  unforced  passion 
for  fine  literature,  and,  at  the  age  of  twenty-one,  when 
Oscar  Wilde  was  the  dominant  power,  he  printed  privately 
My  Ladies'  Sonnets  (1887),  and  five  years  later  appeared 
a  much  larger  volume  of  English  Poems  (1892).  Most  of 
these  poems  are  painfully  immature  and  unrestrained  : 
frequently,  as  in  the  erotic  '  Hesperides,'  they  degenerate 
into  mere  gush.  Apart  from  the  sestheticism  of  Wilde  the 
chief  influence  traceable  is  that  of  Keats.  The  spenserians 
of  '  Paolo  and  Francesca  '  are  imitated  from  Keats,  not 
Spenser ;  '  An  Epithalamium  '  is  loaded  with  ornament ; 
and  a  few  pieces  of  doggerel  remind  us  of  Keats' s  attempts 
in  the  same  manner  of  verse.  But  Keats  was  never  so 
unrestrained,  so  luscious,  so  careless  in  phrase  and  imagery. 
And  although  Keats  in  his  early  poems  has  many  lapses 
in  taste,  versification,  rhyme  and  image,  he  offers  com- 
pensating beauties.  On  the  other  hand  there  is  not  much 
good  poetry  in  the  English  Poems  ;  and  when  Mr.  Le 
Gallienne  attempts  the  grand  style  he  inclines  to  bombast. 

"  With  thunderous  splendour  of  my  rhythmic  ire/' 

is  a  line  both  cacophonous  and  ridiculous  in  its  exaggera- 
tion. Mr.  Le  Gallienne  is  always  too  effusive  in  these 
poems.  He  has  no  respect  for  the  individual  word,  and 
this  is  a  great  failing.  That  he  was  not  altogether  without 
the  power  of  writing  restrained  and  simple  poetry  he 
showed  in  the  beautiful  '  Child's  Evensong  '  and  '  In  Her 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          107 

Diary '  ;  but  the  volume,  as  a  whole,  was  deplorably  ill- 
balanced. 

Happily  in  the  three  years  that  elapsed  before  the  pub- 
lication of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  an  Elegy,  and  other 
Poems  (1895)  Mr.  Le  Gallienne  learned  much.  The  gush 
has  almost  disappeared,  as  in  the  nature  of  things  was 
to  be  expected,  for  the  poems  are  chiefly  personal,  in  the 
form  of  elegy  or  verse-epistle.  The  title-poem  is  not  with- 
out grace  and  felicity,  although  the  apostrophe  to  Steven- 
son, as  "  Virgil  of  prose,"  is  not  very  apt.  '  Tree-worship '  is 
another  poem  exhibiting  a  marked  advance  upon  the  earlier 
writing.  The  analogy,  it  is  true,  contained  in  the  line — 

"  Thy  latticed  column  jetted  up  the  bright  blue  air," 

is  not  illuminating  in  its  reference  to  a  massive  and  gnarled 
tree-stem  ;  and — 

"  Thy  rugged  girth  the  waists  of  fifty  Eastern  girls," 

is  an  example  of  far-fetched  imagery  which  brings  toppling 
down  to  the  associations  of  the  seraglio  the  dignity  of  a 
mighty  tree,  described  in  the  preceding  line  as  "  huge  as  a 
minster."  But  Mr.  Le  Gallienne  is  prone  to  these  slips 
of  disproportion  in  image  and  thought.  His  rhymes,  also, 
are  often  fetched  from  a  far  country.  Perhaps  the  one 
poem  of  this  volume  which  will  always  find  a  place  in 
English  anthologies  is  the  simple  and  moving  "  Second 
Crucifixion." 

A  long  interval,  during  which  Mr.  Le  Gallienne  abandoned 
his  native  country  for  the  United  States,  elapsed  before 
he  published  in  1910  a  collection  of  New  Poems,  which 
opened  with  a  series  evidently  inspired  by  the  Boer  War, 
although  the  poet  does  not,  like  Henley  and  Mr.  Kipling, 
sing  the  praises  of  the  strong.  Rather  he  is  on  the  side 
of  the  little  peoples  who  ask  only  to  be  left 

"...  little  margins,  waste  ends  of  land  and  sea, 
A  little  grass,  and  a  hill  or  two,  and  a  shadowing  tree." 

In  this,  '  The  Cry  of  the  Little  Peoples,'  and  a  few  other 
poems  of  the  volume  there  is  a  clear  passion,  a  simplicity 
in  thought  and  style,  which  places  them  above  his  attain- 
ment in  the  early  books  of  verse  ;  but  often,  again,  he 
attempts  no  more  than  prettiness.  Examples  of  careless 


los  POETRY 

and  exaggerated  writing  are  still  not  infrequent.  It  is 
curious  that  so  late  in  life  Mr.  Le  Gallienne  could  print 
anything  so  inexpressive  as — 

"  London,  that  mighty  sob,  that  splendid  tear, 
That  jewel  hanging  in  the  great  world's  ear." 

This  says  nothing,  and  helps  us  not  a  jot  to  understand 
London.  Compare  with  this  Mr.  Symons'  poems  on 
London,  and  the  difference  in  subtlety,  power  of  observa- 
tion and  expression  is  manifest. 

Mr.  Le  Gallienne' s  verse-volumes  can  only  excite  a  regret 
that  they  contain  work  so  inadequate  as  a  reflection  of  the 
author's  poetical  faculty.  He  is  no  literary  hodman  ;  but 
instability  and  want  of  intellectual  force  have  hampered 
all  his  efforts.  He  has  said  better  what  there  is  in  him  to 
say  in  the  prose  sketches  and  criticism  of  The  Book  Bills 
of  Narcissus  (1889),  Prose  Fancies  (1894-96),  Retrospective 
Reviews  (1896)  and  Little  Dinners  with  the  Sphinx  (1909), 
which  show  that  he  has  fancy,  imagination,  a  genuine 
love  of  good  literature,  critical  powers  above  the  average 
and  the  happy  gift  of  writing  nervous  English  in  cadences 
pleasing  to  the  ear. 

The  distance  we  may  travel  in  twenty  years  is  borne 
in  upon  us  when  we  discover  that  the  Yellow  Book,  regarded 
once  as  typical  of  brilliant  and  youth- 
Arthur  Christopher  ful  originality,  contained  verses  by 
Benson,  b.  1862.  Mr.  Arthur  Christopher  Benson.  With 

the  ideas  of  the  central  group  con- 
nected with  that  magazine  he  had,  it  is  needless  to  say, 
nothing  in  common.  In  all  Mr.  Benson  has  written  some 
five  volumes  of  verse  since  the  privately  printed  Le  Cahier 
Jaune  (1892)  ;  and  a  collected  edition  of  his  poems 
appeared  in  1909.  Yet  he  has  confessed  that  he  has  no 
illusions  about  his  verse,  writing  it  only  as  an  exercise 
in  style.  It  is  little  probable  that  verse  written  in  this 
spirit  and  to  this  end  will  be  of  a  high  order,  or  indeed, 
save  by  a  kind  of  inadvertence,  ever  reach  the  level  of 
poetry.  And  both  in  the  verse  and  prose  of  Mr.  Benson 
too  much  has  been  sacrificed  to  style,  for,  at  last,  even 
style  has  gone,  and  Mr.  Benson's  prose,  which,  at  first, 
had  distinction,  has  slipped  into  mellifluous  garrulity. 
But  his  prose  is  easy  to  read,  his  thought  does  not  tax 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          109 

the  mind  ;    he  is  chiefly  known  as  a  journalistic  essayist, 
and  scarcely  at  all  as  a  poet. 

The  Poems  of  1893  opens  with  a  pretentious  preface, 
coming  from  the  hand  of  a  writer  unknown,  displaying 
the  profound  interest  in  himself  which  has  never  failed 
Mr.  Benson.  He  asserts  his  faith  that  to  be  a  man  is 
more  than  to  be  an  artist,  that  the  simple  experiences 
of  life  are  unchanging  behind  the  burning  questions  of 
the  hour,  that  there  is  a  Divinity  shaping  our  ends,  and 
he  tells  us  that  his  poems  try  "  to  present  certain  aspects 
of  men  and  nature  that  have  come  home  to  him  with 
force."  The  contents  of  this  and  succeeding  volumes — 
Lyrics  (1895),  Lord  Vyet  and  Other  Poems  (1896),  The 
Professor  and  Other  Poems  (1900),  Peace  and  Other  Poems 
(1905),  scarcely  fill  in  the  outline  sketch  of  this  preface. 
Mr.  Benson  is  graceful,  clear,  restfully  meditative,  he 
draws  apt  little  morals  from  all  that  he  sees,  from  the 
creeping  beetle  to  the  floating  thistle-down,  but  he  never, 
whether  he  writes  of  man  or  nature,  comes  sufficiently 
near  to  his  theme  to  hold  the  reader.  This  is  specially 
true  of  his  poems  on  men.  In  the  lines  written  to  Dean 
Swift  the  poet  asks  what  deductions  are  to  be  drawn 
from  Swift's  life-story,  and  answers — 

"  This  :  that  our  days  are  wholly  incomplete  ; — 

Some  baseness  mars  them,  some  un banished  taint, 
That  clogs  in  miry  ways  the  aspiring  feet, 

And  specks  the  robe  of  many  a  willing  saint." 

Swift  himself  was  no  great  preacher,  but  he  would  have 
been  surprised  at  this  prosy  moral  pointed  by  his  life. 
In  a  few  poems  of  men — '  My  Friend,'  '  The  Dead  Poet ' 
and  '  Lord  Vyet  '—Mr.  Benson  does  write  effectively  and 
strongly.  But  he  is  at  his  best  in  poems  of  nature,  for 
he  can  observe  closely  and  paint  in  graceful  words  the 
brooding  quiet  and  subdued  colouring  of  English  lawns 
and  meadows.  Unfortunately  he  thinks  it  incumbent 
upon  him  to  deduce  a  trite  moral  from  every  scene  and 
incident.  The  burrowing  mole  reminds  the  poet  that 
"  beneath  free  air  and  merry  sun  "  he  is  shut  in  by  "  dark 
fancies  "  ;  the  ugly  toad  suggests  that  man  dreams  of 
loveliness  and  is  blind  to  truth  ;  the  brief  existence  of 
the  glittering  dragon-fly  bids  him  remember  that  man's 


110  POETRY  [PART  i 

life  is  short.  There  is  a  monotony  in  these  moral  deduc- 
tions which  neither  say  anything  new  nor  express  the 
old  with  any  originality.  Mr.  Benson  handles  his  metres 
sufficiently  well,  his  style  is  exact  and  careful,  he  is  grace- 
ful and  consistent,  but  in  verse  he  never  achieves  the 
distinction  he  has  attained  in  his  earlier  prose.  As  a  poet 
he  is  no  more  than  the  writer  of  meditative  verses  contain- 
ing a  philosophy  of  smooth  and  cultured  sentimentalism. 

Dean  Beeching,  country  clergyman,  poet,  essayist  and 
editor,  is  known  as  a  poet  by  his  share  in  Love  in  Idleness 
(1883),  Love's  Looking-glass  (1891,  which  con- 
Henry  Charles  tained  also  poems  by  Mr.  J.  W.  Mackail  and 
Beeching,  Mr.    J.    B.    Nichols),  but  chiefly  by  In   a 

1859-1919.  Garden  (1895).  It  is  by  the  last  volume 
that  he  is  to  be  judged  as  a  poet  and 
writer  of  contemplative  verses,  pleasant  and  graceful  like 
those  of  Mr.  A.  C.  Benson,  though  never  original  or 
stimulating.  His  poetry  is  inspired  by  the  secluded  quiet 
of  an  English  rectory  garden,  but  it  is  almost  entirely 
wanting  in  the  personal  emotion  and  truthfulness  of  Mr. 
Norman  Gale's  pastoral  poems.  Flowers,  lawns  and  garden- 
ways  are  seen  through  the  veil  of  familiar  acquaintance 
with  the  best  that  is  in  English  poetry.  Yet  his  writing 
is  never  signally  weak  or  monotonously  trite ;  it  gives 
pleasure  if  not  exhilaration  ;  and  he  avoids  the  tiresome 
habit  of  discovering  parables  in  nature.  In  '  Accidia  ' 
and  '  Love  Unreturned  '  Dean  Beeching  has  written  good 
sonnets,  and  the  strong  and  simple  '  Heart  and  Wit ' 
is  an  outstanding  poem.  But  in  sincerity,  directness  and 
mastery  of  language  several  of  the  religious  pieces  stand 
with  the  best  of  his  work.  '  The  Tree  of  Life '  and 
'  Prayers  '  are  both  poems  that  will  bear  many  readings. 
Apart  from  these  perhaps  the  most  truly  beautiful  of  his 
poems  is  contained  in  the  section  entitled  '  In  a  Garden  "  : 

"  Rose  and  lily,  white  and  red, 
From  my  garden  garlanded, 
These  I  brought  and  thought  to  grace 
The  perfection  of  thy  face. 
Other  roses,  pink  and  pale, 
Lilies  of  another  vale, 
Thou  hast  bound  around  thy  head 
In  the  garden  of  the  dead." 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          111 

In  this  short  poem  Dean  Beeching  rises  above  versifica- 
tion into  the  plane  of  true  poetry.  But  in  all  he  belongs 
to  the  class  of  poets  who  are  made  not  born.  In  verse 
his  content  is  thin  ;  he  rarely  rises  above  quiet  medita- 
tiveness  expressed  in  words  he  has  learned  and  borrowed 
of  good  literature.  His  best  work  lies  elsewhere,  in  the 
writing  of  those  delightful  and  charming  volumes  of 
miscellany,  Papers  from  a  Private  Diary  (1898)  and 
Provincial  and  Other  Papers  (1906). 

Mr.  Norman  Gale,  like  Dean  Beeching,  is  one  of  those 
poets,  more  common  in  England  than  elsewhere,  made 
by  the  traditions  of  public  school  and 
Norman  Kowland  university  life.  Theirs  is  the  poetry  of 
Gale,  b.  1862.  scholarly  grace  and  ordered  leisure,  suf- 
ficiently quickened  from  mere  academic- 
ism by  a  vein  of  strong  humanity.  Like  Herrick  in 
another  day,  like  T.  E.  Brown  and  Mr.  Robert  Bridges 
in  this,  Mr.  Gale  sings  in  scholarly  verse  the  sweetness 
of  meadows,  lanes,  hedgerows,  thick-set  plantations .  and 
purling  streams;  and  mingling  with  poems  of  this  kind 
are  dainty  love-lyrics  in  the  manner  and  the  metres  of 
the  Caroline  poets.  His  best  and  most  distinctive  work 
is  contained  in  the  two  series  of  A  Country  Muse  (1892-93), 
Orchard  Songs  (1893),  and  the  much  later  collection  of 
Song  in  September  (1912).  His  love-songs  are  more 
reminiscent  of  Herrick  than  of  anybody  else ;  in  his 
fastidious  use  of  the  simplest  words,  in  the  delicate  beauty 
of  his  rhythms,  in  the  graceful  nuance  of  his  thought, 
he  is  nearer  to  Mr.  Robert  Bridges  than  to  any  other 
modern  poet.  He  has  no  message,  he  is  untroubled  by  the 
problems  of  the  day,  its  theologies,  class  conflicts  and 
party  struggles.  He  finds  all  of  life  that  he  needs  in  the 
limits  of  a  garden,  a  few  square  miles  of  the  English 
country-side,  and,  it  may  be  added,  a  playing  field,  for 
during  several  years  Mr.  Gale  was  a  schoolmaster.  In 
the  simple,  strong,  sweet  and  enduring  things  he  finds 
happiness  and  the  inspiration  of  his  poetry. 

"  I  am  content  to  know  that  God  is  great, 

The  Lord  of  fish  and  fowl,  of  air  and  sea — 
Some  little  points  are  misty.     Let  them  wait." 

Mr.  Gale  attempts  nothing  new,  he  is  content  to  follow 
the  tradition  of  English  song- writers  of  the  best  period ; 


112  POETRY  [PART  i 

his  country  scenes  and  country  folk  are  idealised,  even 
more  idealised  than  Herrick's,  for  he  has  none  of  Herrick's 
interest  in  custom  and  folk-lore.  In  the  love-lyrics  the 
conventional  words  are  repeated  a  hundred  times — 
white,  snow,  breast,  lace,  hose,  garters — and  he  can  be  as 
frank  as  need  reasonably  be  expected  of  a  nineteenth 
century  Herrick.  But  his  is  the  frankness  of  literary 
artifice,  not  of  realism,  and  the  critics  who  drew  forth  his 
'  Defense,'  in  the  volume  of  Orchard  Songs,  must  have 
been  unworthy  the  honour  done  them. 

Song  in  September  bears  unmistakable  traces  of  middle- 
age  reflectiveness  ;  many  of  the  poems  are  more  serious 
in  intention,  more  loaded  with  thought  than  the  simple 
pastoral  verses  Mr.  Gale  wrote  as  a  young  man.  A  note 
of  melancholy  intrudes,  and  in  '  The  Cherry  of  Lucullus  ' 
he  arraigns  his  country  in  the  spirit  of  Sir  William  Watson. 
In  these  poems  there  is  less  of  the  Caroline  influence  and 
more  of  the  modern  spirit.  An  interval  of  nearly  twenty 
years  separates  Orchard  Songs  from  Song  in  September. 
In  these  years  he  published  verses,  for  the  most  part 
humorous,  on  the  game  of  cricket — Cricket  Songs  (1894) 
and  More  Cricket  Songs  (1905) — verses  for  children  and 
short  idylls  in  prose,  notably  A  June  Romance  (1894).  A 
break  of  so  many  years,  chiefly  surrendered  to  jeux 
d' esprit,  is  curious  in  a  poet  of  unquestionable  lyric  charm 
and  genius.  In  the  end,  however,  Mr.  Gale  came  back 
to  his  own,  to  pastoral  poetry,  not  a  whit  less  beautiful, 
if  a  little  more  serious  and  grave  than  his  first.  His  best 
work  is  to  be  found  in  the  three  early  volumes  and  the 
last,  which  contain  a  poetry  of  true  inspiration,  if  a  little 
limited  in  appeal  and  charm. 

The  change  is  necessarily  abrupt  when  we  turn  from 

the  reflective,  meditative  and  mystic  poets  just  named 

to  two  writers  of  romantic  ballads, 

Sir  Arthur  Quiller-  Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch  and  Sir 
Couch,  b.  1863.  Henry  Newbolt.  The  verse  of  Sir 

Arthur  Quiller-Couch  has  been  forced 
into  a  secondary  place  by  his  prose  fiction,  but  he  has 
written  a  small  quantity  of  spirited  poetry.  He  early 
showed  his  literary  gift  in  the  facility  with  which  he 
caught  the  manner  of  other  men  in  Verses  and  Parodies 
(1893).  The  '  Anecdote  for  Fathers  '  is  much  better 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  118 

parody  of  Wordsworth  than  the  famous  example  in 
Rejected  Addresses,  and  the  travesties  of  Whitman  and 
Browning  only  suffer  from  being  too  short.  As  a  writer 
of  more  serious  verse  Sir  Arthur  Quiller- Couch  has 
published  two  volumes  in  twenty  years,  Poems  and 
Ballads  (1896)  and  The  Vigil  of  Venus  and  Other  Poems 
(1912).  The  longest  piece  in  Poems  and  Ballads,  a  blank- 
verse  monologue,  '  Columbus  at  Seville,'  is  simpler  and 
more  vigorous  than  Tennyson's  dramatic  monologue 
representing  Columbus  in  old  age  and  misfortune.  But 
better  still  are  the  ballads — '  The  Comrade,'  '  The  Masquer 
in  the  Street '  and  '  Sabina.'  In  these  the  author  seizes 
admirably  the  lilt  and  rhythm  of  ballad  measure.  The 
most  important  poem  in  The  Vigil  of  Venus  is  a  free 
translation  of  the  Pervigilium  Veneris,  in  which  Sir  Arthur 
Quiller-Couch  has  succeeded  in  writing  a  fine  poem,  save 
that  he  suggests  too  strongly  the  melody  and  diction  of 
Swinburne.  In  nearly  all  his  ballads  and  lyrics  a  spring 
of  true  poetry  rises,  and  when  inspiration  is  weak  its 
place  is  partly  supplied  by  the  admirable  literary  gift 
the  author  possesses.  In  whatever  he  touches  he  is  never 
awkward,  he  never  fails  of  a  certain  charm  in  manner. 

Sir  Henry  Newbolt  has  the  fortune  to  be  a  popular  poet, 

and  his  poetry  betrays  the  limitations  of  all  popular  poetry 

— it  is  never  poetical  in  a  high  sense. 

Sir  Henry  John  After  long  years  of  practice  at  the 

Newbolt,  b.  1862.  Bar  he  opened  his  literary  career  with 
a  prose  story  and  followed  it  with  a 
blank-verse  drama,  Mordred  (1895),  written  in  good  but 
exceedingly  Tennysonian  verse.  Tennyson  degraded  the 
Arthurian  legends  to  picturesque  sentiment ;  and  it  will  be 
some  time  before  any  poet  can  restore  to  life  the  Arthurian 
cycle  of  stories.  William  Morris  and  Matthew  Arnold 
are  only  successful  in  short  passages  ;  Swinburne  alone, 
in  the  passionate  sweep  and  magnificent  heroic  measure 
of  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,  successfully  defied  the  Tenny- 
sonian influence.  Sir  Henry  Newbolt' s  Mordred  is  frankly 
imitative,  and  its  characterisation  is  weak.  It  was  with 
the  stirring  sea-songs  of  Admirals  All  (1897)  that  he 
deservedly  won  reputation.  Admirals  All  contained  twelve 
short  poems.  It  was  followed  by  The  Island  Race  (1898), 
which  added  twenty-eight  pieces.  Even  to-day  all  his 


114  POETRY  [PART  i 

verse  may  be  printed  in  a  single  volume  of  moderate 
size.  Like  Mr.  Kipling  he  is  the  singer  of  England's 
mission  of  imperialism ;  but  he  has  more  historical 
sense  than  Mr.  Kipling  and  more  often  finds  his  subjects 
in  the  past  of  English  naval  story.  His  temper  is  breezy 
and  free,  he  delights  in  manhood,  youth  and  courage,  he 
is  untroubled  by  the  morbid  introspectiveness  of  the  age, 
and  when  he  chooses  the  r6le  of  the  prophet  it  is  to 
exhort  England  to  remember  her  heaven-sent  mission  to 
conquer  and  thereby  bless  that  part  of  the  earth  which 
is  still  unhappy  in  its  freedom  from  British  rule.  His 
poems  are  stirring,  dramatic,  vivid,  written  with  a  good 
swing  rather  than  with  careful  versification.  In  '  The 
Ballad  of  John  Nicholson  '  he  is  on  Mr.  Kipling's  ground, 
India,  and  in  no  short  ballad  has  Mr.  Kipling  succeeded 
in  this  way  in  catching  the  spirit  of  the  epic  :  on  the 
other  hand  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  never  comes  within 
measurable  distance  of  the  poetical  intensity  of  '  Man- 
dalay.'  Among  other  early  poems  the  truly  splendid 
'  Vse  Victis  '  departs  from  merely  ballad  form  and  ap- 
proaches the  manner  of  great  poetry.  But  had  the  other 
poems  of  the  little  volume  been  of  this  kind  it  would 
hardly  have  caught  the  popular  fancy  as  it  did.  The  one 
ringing  and  unforgettable  ballad  is  '  Drake's  Drum  '  : 

"  Drake  he  was  a  Devon  man,  an'  sailed  the  Devon  seas, 

(Capten,  art  tha  sleepin'  there  below  ?) 
Rovin'  tho'  his  death  fell,  he  went  wi'  heart  at  ease, 
An'  dreamin'  arl  the  time  o'  Plymouth  Hoe. 

"  Take  my  drum  to  England,  hang  et  by  the  shore, 

Strike  et  when  your  powder's  runnin'  low  ; 
If  the  Dons  sight  Devon,  I'll  quit  the  port'o'  Heaven, 

An'  drum  them  up  the  Channel  as  we  drummed  them  long 
ago." 

In  The  Sailing  of  the  Longships  (1902)  and  Songs  of 
Memory  and  Hope  (1909)  his  inspiration  grows  weaker. 
In  many  poems  of  the  first  volume  he  is  moved,  with 
Henley  and  Mr.  Kipling,  to  sing  individual  acts  of 
courage  which  went  some  way  to  redeem  our  initial 
failures  in  South  Africa.  But  none  of  these  verses 
has  the  same  ring  as  the  earlier  sea-songs.  Far  better 
are  the  fine  '  Commemoration,'  and  '  Srahmandazi,'  the 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          115 

ballad  of  an  African  bride  who  chose  rather  than  life  to 
accompany  her  lord  through  the  gates  of  death.  In 
Songs  of  Memory  and  Hope  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  became 
imitative  and  even  a  little  dull.  The  breeziness  has  almost 
gone  ;  and  the  poems  are  commonplace  both  in  thought 
and  expression.  It  is  masculine  and  common-sense  writing, 
but  scarcely  poetry ;  for  he  exhausted  all  that  he  felt 
and  all  that  he  had  to  say,  with  one  or  two  exceptions, 
in  the  early  sea-songs.  It  is  true  that  in  the  six  new 
ditties  which  open  the  volume  of  Poems  New  and  Old 
(1912),  especially  in  the  '  Song  of  the  Sou'  Wester,'  he 
seems  to  catch  a  little  of  the  old  spirit,  but  in  a  manner 
imitative  of  his  earlier  self.  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  is  breezy, 
patriotic,  warm-hearted,  his  poetry  is  animated  by  high 
ideals  and  a  sense  of  good  form  in  life  ;  but  the  content 
is  thin,  the  imaginative  element  scarcely  exists,  and  he 
has  little  metrical  faculty  beyond  an  ear  for  racy  and 
vigorous  lilting  in  words.  He  has  written  a  few  excellent 
songs  and  ballads,  but  the  finer  breath  of  passionate  and 
intense  poetry,  quickened  by  emotion  strong  and  heart- 
felt, he  has  never  felt. 


It  is  a  good  rule,  worthy  of  acceptation,  never  to  write 
upon  living  authors,  unless  it  be  recognised  that  this  is 
but  a  means  of  study  and  inquiry,  not  a  dogmatic  assigna- 
tion of  values.  It  is  only  with  diffidence  we  can  attempt 
to  define  and  characterise  the  work  of  writers  who  may 
yet  have  many  active  years  before  them.  And  in  this 
section  of  the  present  chapter  mention  is  made,  so  far  as 
possible,  only  of  poetry  published  within  this  century. 
New  names  constantly  appear,  some  to  remain,  many  to 
disappear  in  a  few  months  or  years.  The  reason  of  this 
differentiation  is  not  always  apparent  to  us  :  we  are 
reading  with  our  eyes  too  close  to  the  book  to  see  the 
print  distinctly.  The  task  of  selection  from  the  unending 
stream  of  printed  verse  can  only  be  undertaken  in  a 
temper  of  hesitation  qualified  by  the  knowledge  that 
judgments  have  their  value  relatively  to  us,  though  forty 
years  hence  they  may  seem  blind  and  groping  estimates. 
In  all  ages  true  poetry  is  the  same,  but  its  value  is  con- 


116  POETRY  [PART  i 

ditioned  by  time  and  place,  and  the  universal  poet,  whom 
time  cannot  wither,  has  seldom  been  born.  But  poetry 
is  always  poetry ;  the  distinction  between  major  and 
minor  poetry  is  a  fallacy  of  the  Philistines.  Poetry  and 
verse,  it  is  true,  are  two  different  things,  and  the  most 
of  men  who  attempt  to  write  poetry  only  write  verse. 
But  many  of  lesser  note  have  written  a  poem  or  two 
which  would  always  be  quoted  if  contained  in  the  standard 
editions  of  Goethe  or  Shelley.  The  difference  between 
the  greater  and  the  lesser  poet  is  a  matter  of  quantity ; 
the  former  writes  more  poetry  and  less  verse  in  pro- 
portion to  his  total  output.  But  a  poem  is  always  a 
poem  by  whomsoever  written.  Sir  William  Watson 
and  others  have  cavilled  at  the  distinction  between 
major  and  minor  poets  :  but  the  distinction  is  entirely 
to  be  justified.  The  major  poet  writes  more  poetry  and 
less  verse  :  that  is  all.  It  is  the  drawing  of  a  distinction 
between  major  and  minor  poetry  which  involves  confusion 
in  thought.  Yet  the  best  of  critics  may  be  ludicrously 
mistaken  in  reading  contemporary  poetry.  Perhaps  it 
is  true  that  the  poetry  meant  for  all  time  is  not  so  clearly 
poetry  for  the  men  of  an  age,  for  its  value  is  unconditioned 
and  the  critic's  outlook  is  conditioned  by  his  environ- 
ment. And,  therefore,  while  verse  will  not  often  appear 
as  poetry,  great  poetry  may  often  appear  as  incompetent 
blundering  in  the  critic's  eyes.  But,  on  the  whole,  what 
is  bad  will  soon  reveal  itself  to  the  unprejudiced  observer. 
If  some  good  poetry  must  at  first  pass  unrecognised  for 
what  it  is,  this  is  only  a  temporary  evil,  for  probably  Mr. 
George  Moore  is  justified  in  his  optimistic  faith  that  no 
true  poem  can  be  finally  lost.  If  we  can  only  read  with 
defective  and  short  sight  the  poetry  that  is  being  made 
to-day,  we  have,  at  least,  some  advantage  over  those 
who  after  us  read  with  clearer  insight.  We  can  never 
read  Hamlet  as  the  man  who  first  read  it  in  its  earliest 
printed  form,  although  he  knew  little  of  Shakespeare's 
greatness  and  we  much. 

It  is,  therefore,  better  to  read  contemporary  verse  for 
the  joy  and  inspiration  it  may  afford  us  individually, 
untroubled  by  any  desire  to  speak  or  write  of  it.  But  the 
blind  adventure  often  brings  its  reward,  and  a  greater  than 
we  hoped.  In  any  case,  as  we  are  here  chiefly  concerned 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          117 

with  poets  who  only  recently  began  to  publish  and  still 
write,  it  will  be  well  to  name  first  one  already  dead, 
whose  first  book  of  verse  appeared  fourteen  years  since. 
To  the  wider  public  Henry  Dawson  Lowry  was  little 
known  at  any  time,  and  during  his  life  almost  entirely 

as  a  writer  of  prose.  The  sum  of 
Henry  Dawson  Lowry,  his  work  is  small — a  novel,  several 
1869-1906.  collections  of  short  stories,  two  slender 

volumes  of  poetry  and  a  child's  book. 

He  died  young  ;  but  as  a  journalist  and  story- writer  he 
was  at  work  for  at  least  seventeen  or  eighteen  years,  and 
the  smallness  of  his  output  is  evidence  of  his  fastidious 
temper.  And,  further,  journalism  pursued  for  a  liveli- 
hood filled  a  large  part  of  his  working  hours.  At  the  age 
of  twenty-one  he  began  to  contribute  to  the  National 
Observer,  and  soon  became  one  of  that  distinguished  band 
Henley  gathered  about  him.  When  the  National  Observer 
came  to  an  end  he  contributed  to  various  papers,  and 
finally,  in  1897,  he  joined  the  literary  staff  of  the  Morning 
Post.  In  his  lifetime  he  only  published  one  volume  of 
poetry,  The  Hundred  Windows  (1904).  A  posthumous 
collection  of  inferior  verse,  A  Dream  of  Daffodils,  appeared 
in  1912.  Many  of  the  poems  in  the  first  volume  are 
inspired  by  a  love  of  Cornwall,  of  the  brooding  peace, 
silent  hills  and  green  valleys  of  the  West  Country.  In 
all  his  poems  is  revealed  the  temper  of  a  singularly  gentle 
and  beautiful  mind,  melancholy  in  its  moods  and  naturally 
attuned  to  the  colourless  skies  and  landscapes  of  Cornwall. 
He  writes  : 

"  And  you,  who  love  me,  if  you  would  know  me 

Come  away  to  the  Western  sea, 
The  land  that  did  make  shall  take  and  show  me 
Better  than  that  I  have  seemed  to  be." 

The  strongest  as  well  as  the  most  beautiful  poems  of  the 
volume  are  '  Art  in  Life  '  and  '  Art  and  Life.'  By  his 
admirers  he  has  been  compared  to  Keats  and  Heine. 
But  these  comparisons  profit  little.  He  has  nothing  of 
Heine's  wayward  strength,  nothing  of  Keats' s  wealth  of 
language  and  picturesque  decorativeness.  His  poetry  has 
little  strength,  but  much  beauty  :  it  is  never  careless, 
never  loud  ;  it  reflects  a  mind,  quiet,  reserved,  brooding. 


118  POETRY  [PART  i 

ForJLowry  poetry  was  an  escape  from  the  vulgar  battle 
of  life  to  those  thoughts  and  dreams  that  were  lovelier 
than  all  experience. 

Of  poets  still  quite  young  one  of  the  most  widely  read 
and  known  is  Mr.  Alfred  Noyes.    His  poetry  has  the  happy 

fortune  to  be  saleable.  And  in  1913  when 
Alfred  Noyes,  he  encouraged  his  popularity  by  lecturing 
b.  1880.  in  America  he  was  hailed  as  the  greatest 

poet  since  Tennyson.  A  few  years  have 
still  to  pass  before  Mr.  Noyes  will  be  forty,  and  he 
began  to  publish  poetry  only  sixteen  years  ago.  Con- 
temporary popularity  may  or  may  not  have  its  moral. 
In  the  case  of  Mr.  Noyes  it  clearly  has  ;  for  his  imagina- 
tion never  passes  outside  the  range  of  ordinary  men's 
understanding,  he  appeals  to  the  common  intelligence  by 
the  prettiness  or  heroics  of  his  verse,  and  the  obvious, 
sing-song  music  of  his  lines  has  charms  for  the  least- 
trained  ear.  Further,  the  ideas  he  embodies  in  poems  of 
a  religious  nature,  such  as  '  De  Profundis '  and  '  The 
Paradox,'  are  those  commonly  accepted  by  the  majority 
of  English  readers.  He  always  steers  a  course  widely 
distant  from  the  innermost  heart  of  man,  that  greatest 
of  all  things  ;  and  he  is,  therefore,  never  revolutionary, 
never  disturbing.  Mr.  Noyes'  facile  readiness  in  the  use 
of  a  pictorial  language  does  not  suffice  to  make  true  poetry 
of  a  world  which  he  conceives  largely  as  a  well-stocked 
and  glittering  bazaar. 

He  is  a  rapid  writer.  In  four  years  he  produced  four 
volumes — two  miscellaneous  collections,  The  Loom  of 
Years  (1902)  and  Poems  (1904),  and  two  long  fairy-tale 
poems,  The  Flower  of  Old  Japan  (1903)  and  The  Forest 
of  Wild  Thyme  (1905).  The  first  of  these  volumes  is 
accomplished,  the  verse  is  pretty,  but  there  is  little  that 
is  distinctive  or  strong.  '  The  Lotus  of  Wisdom  '  is  not 
without  fine  imagery  ;  the  '  Love-song  of  Moina  '  avoids 
the  hammered  accents  so  common  with  Mr.  Noyes  ;  '  An 
^Esthete  '  has  a  more  direct  force  than  is  generally  to  be 
found  in  his  writing  ;  but  the  finest  poem  of  the  volume 
is  the  blank-verse  narrative  of  '  Michael  Oaktree,'  a  poem 
which  won  the  praise  of  George  Meredith.  It  is  plain, 
severe,  free  from  superfluous  ornament,  and  reaches  the 
heart  in  the  restrained  and  dignified  pathos  with  which 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES  119 

it  tells  of  an  old  cottager's  quiet  death.  And  the  poem 
contains  one  impressive  image,  Hebraic  in  its  breadth 
and  simplicity — 

"  Then  Michael  Oaktree  took  his  wife's  thin  hand 
Between  his  big  rough  hands  and  held  it.     There 
It  lay  like  a  tired  ewe,  between  two  crags, 
Sheltered  from  all  the  winds." 

The  fault  of  the  volume  and  of  the  second  miscellaneous 
collection  is  the  monotonous  and  commonplace  music  of 
the  lines.  There  are  poems  as  bad  in  this  respect  as  the 
worst  in  church  hymnals.  '  Sea  Foam,'  for  example,  is 
grotesquely  like  a  well-known  hymn.  '  The  Barrel  Organ ' 
is  symbolic  of  its  subject ;  it  is  verse  ground  out  by  the 
turning  of  a  handle.  Lilting  sing-song  is  Mr.  Noyes' 
snare.  And  he  continually  glides  into  a  poetry  of  cloying 
sweetness  or  the  prettiness  of  Dresden  china  ornament. 
These  lapses  make  it  difficult  to  read  him  with  any  con- 
stant pleasure,  although  he  can  write  poems  of  real  power, 
which  manifest  his  instinctive  responsiveness  to  the  beauty 
of  the  world,  his  love  of  colour  and  a  faculty,  on  occasion, 
for  writing  metrically  without  dropping  into  obvious 
lilts.  The  blank  verse  '  Night  on  St.  Helena  '  is  a  poem 
of  distinction  ;  '  The  Old  Sceptic  '  and  '  Lessons  '  are 
humanly  sincere  ;  among  more  philosophic  poems  '  The 
Fisher-girl '  is  a  strong  piece  of  writing  ;  '  Silk  o'  the 
Kine  '  and  '  Sherwood  '  are  poems  of  true  and  unaffected 
beauty. 

But  in  his  early  work  nothing  is  so  indicative  of  the 
bent  of  Mr.  Noyes'  poetic  faculty  as  the  two  fairy  tales 
in  verse,  The  Flower  of  Old  Japan  and  The  Forest  of  Wild 
Thyme.  In  the  former,  especially,  Mr.  Noyes  has  created 
something  fresh  and  entirely  pleasing  in  this  weaving 
of  a  bizarre,  grotesque,  pretty  and  fanciful  fairy  allegory 
from  the  willow-pattern.  His  naive  and  not  very  subtle 
melodies  are  here  perfectly  in  place,  in  a  bazaar-like 
world  of  dainty  things — ivories,  fans,  gorgeously  plumaged 
birds,  bright-sailed  ships,  glancing  seas  and  gleaming 
clouds.  Even  Mr.  W.  W.  Gibson  in  his  early  poems  does 
not  paint  so  brightly  as  this,  for  Mr.  Noyes  outvies  the 
extravagant  painting  of  Browning  in  Sordello.  It  may  be 
said  of  these  early  volumes  that  they  are  sane,  healthy, 


120  POETRY  [PART  1 

and,  within  circumscribed  limits,  imaginative  and  glowing 
with  colour,  but  they  rarely  reach  the  clearer  and  greater 
poetry  of  '  Michael  Oaktree.' 

After  these  trials  of  his  pen  Mr.  Noyes  essayed  the 
ambitious  task  of  writing  an  English  epic  in  twelve  books  of 
blank  verse.  And  in  a  region  far  different  from  the  pretty 
and  decorative  poetry  of  the  fairy  tales  he  won  undoubted 
success.  The  merit  of  Drake  (1906-8)  is  not  single  :  the 
blank  verse  is  handled  with  narrative  power  which  imme- 
diately raises  it  above  much  of  his  rhymed  verse  ;  the 
drama  of  England's  sea-story  in  the  days  of  Elizabeth 
is  made  to  move  in  vivid  pageantry  before  our  eyes  ; 
and  the  "  wind-darkened  sea "  is  conceived  with  epic 
breadth  as  a  spirit  of  destiny  brooding  over  the  action  of 
the  poem.  It  may  be  added,  and  this  is  no  disparage- 
ment, that  read  merely  as  a  story  the  poem  is  interesting. 
In  his  Dawn  in  Britain  Mr.  Doughty  attempted  to  write 
in  large  outline  an  epic  of  our  island  story,  and  he  has 
communicated  to  his  poem  an  atmosphere  of  the  dim 
and  the  mysterious  more  impressive  than  the  silvern 
lucidity  of  Drake.  But  whereas  Mr.  Doughty  is  barely 
readable  Mr.  Noyes  carries  the  reader  with  him.  If 
occasionally  the  verse  rings  like  thin  beaten  metal,  it 
is  for  the  greater  part,  at  least,  adequate  to  its  subject ; 
and  it  rises  occasionally  to  passages  of  imaginative  splen- 
dour or  passionate  intensity. 

The  contents  of  Forty  Singing  Seamen  (1907)  and  The 
Enchanted  Island  (1909)  are  not  in  any  striking  character- 
istics distinguished  from  the  Poems  of  1904 — there  is  the 
same  command  of  words,  the  same  love  of  colour  and 
ornament,  the  same  absence  of  the  sudden  surprises  of 
greater  poetry,  the  same  easy  lyrical  faculty.  The 
Enchanted  Island  contains  a  few  poems — '  In  a  Railway 
Carriage '  and  '  The  Newspaper  Boy '  among  them— 
which  show  that  Mr.  Noyes  is  following  the  leading  of  the 
time  toward  a  realistic  limning  of  common  life  in  verse. 
'  The  Admiral's  Ghost '  reminds  us  of  Sir  Henry  New- 
bolt,  and  is  quite  as  good  ;  and  the  lines  '  On  the  Death 
of  Francis  Thompson '  have  caught  something  of  the 
remoteness  of  utterance  and  mystic  fervour  of  the  poet 
they  celebrate.  The  title-poem  of  Forty  Singing  Seamen, 
a  rollicking  and  humorous  ballad,  is  one  of  the  best  and 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          121 

strongest  things  Mr.  Noyes  has  written  ;  but  hi  '  Orpheus 
and  Eurydice  '  and  other  poems  he  becomes  merely  fluent 
and  verbose  ;  and  the  patriotic  songs  of  the  volume  have 
no  distinction.  In  The  Wine  Press  :  A  Tale  of  War  (1913) 
poetry  is  shouldered  aside  by  rhetoric  and  exaggerated 
declamation.  The  righting  in  the  Balkans  laid  upon  Mr. 
Noyes  the  burden  of  the  prophet  denouncing  war.  He 
is  passionately  sincere  in  uttering  his  message  ;  he  heaps 
in  disorderly  congestion  gruesome  details  and  horrifying 
scenes  ;  he  breaks  out  in  unbalanced  tirades  upon  the 
giant  evil  of  war ;  he  forgets  that  restraint,  not  fanaticism, 
is  power.  Like  Mr.  Masefield  in  poems  of  another  kind 
he  can  lose  himself  in  a  whirl  of  meaningless  violence. 

But  The  Wine  Press  is  an  eccentricity  on  the  part  of 
Mr.  Noyes.  As  a  poet  he  follows,  without  any  strong 
admixture  of  personality,  the  main  tradition  of  English 
poetry.  There  is  little  that  is  individual  in  his  writing  : 
he  has  nothing  of  Mr.  Symons'  subtlety,  or  the  impressive 
simplicity  of  Mr.  Hardy,  or  the  passionate  strength  of 
John  Davidson.  These  three  names,  to  mention  no  others, 
stand  for  definite  aims,  ideals  and  methods  of  self-expres- 
sion. Mr.  Noyes  is  always  sanely  beautiful,  he  uses  a 
large  vocabulary  with  fluent  readiness,  he  has  a  true  but 
not  fine  gift  of  song,  marred  by  careless  and  undistinguished 
use  of  metre.  Like  Tennyson  he  is  always  readable,  but 
not  often  stimulating.  Nevertheless,  it  is  a  tribute  to 
Mr.  Noyes'  powers  to  be  compelled  to  confess  that  he 
is  a  true  poet  in  forms  so  widely  dissevered  as  that  fairy 
allegory,  fragrant  with  the  perfume  of  roses  and  tea 
gardens,  The  Flower  of  Old  Japan,  and  the  finely  versified 
epic  drama  of  Drake. 

Two  parallelisms  may  be  discovered  between  Mr.  Sturge 
Moore  and  Mr.  Noyes  in  that  each  writes  with  unresting 
and  commendable  rapidity  and  in  each 
T.  Sturge  Moore,     the  ear  fails  to  detect  the  more  subtle 
b.  1870.  cadences   of  word-music.     In   other  re- 

spects, in  choice  of  classic  theme  and 
the  use  of  irregular  measures,  it  is  natural  to  compare 
Mr.  Sturge  Moore  to  Mr.  Hewlett ;  but  he  has  not  yet 
given  us  in  melody  and  colouring  any  reading  of  classic 
legend  as  beautiful  or  significant  as  The  Agonists.  Mr. 
Sturge  Moore  has  won  reputation  both  as  a  poet  and  a 


122  POETRY  [PART  I 

critic  of  art.  As  a  poet  he  began  by  publishing  a  small 
volume  of  miscellaneous  verse,  The  Vine-dresser  and  Other 
Poems  (1899).  His  succeeding  volumes  may  be  divided 
into  poetic  drama  (for  reading,  not  representation), 
including  Aphrodite  Against  Artemis  (1901),  Absolom 
(1903),  and  Mariamne  (1911) ;  dialogue  poems — The 
Centaur's  Booty  (1903),  The  Rout  of  the  Amazons  (1903) 
and  Pan's  Prophecy  (1904)  ;  several  small  collections  of 
lyric  verse — The  Gazelles  and  Other  Poems  (1904),  To  Leda 
and  Other  Odes  (1904),  Theseus,  Medea  and  Lyrics  (1904) ; 
and  a  long  lyric,  Danac  (1903).  In  none  of  these  does  Mr. 
Sturge  Moore  sink  beneath  a  high  level  of  literary  accom- 
plishment, he  never  becomes  commonplace,  but  equally 
he  fails,  in  general,  to  reach  the  plane  of  pure  poetry. 
The  dramatic  poems  are  written  in  blank  verse  or  in 
irregular  unrhymed  metres,  and  in  no  case  does  he  acquit 
himself  as  a  prosodist  of  distinction.  Not  a  little  of  his 
blank  verse  is  hammered  out  in  a  long  series  of  end- 
stopt  lines.  In  this  respect  Mariamne  is  no  better  than 
the  early  poems,  indeed  perhaps  worse.  It  is  difficult  to 
read  continuously  and  with  pleasure  verse  like — 

"  Not  in  kings'  houses  is  it  hard  to  find 
False  witnesses,  when  one  can  seek  with  gold  ; 
Nor  are  those  high  in  honour  envied  least ; 
Nor  does  a  woman's  hatred  take  a  sword, — 
The  tongue  that  sows  dissensions  she  prefers. 
Think  how  thyself  stood  in  like  peril  once 
Of  Cleopatra's  most  offending  tongue  !  " 

This  is  wanting  in  ear  and  skill,  and  the  passage  may 
often  be  matched  in  Mr.  Moore's  blank  verse.  It  makes 
the  plays  monotonous  reading.  He  is  more  at  home  in 
irregular  forms  of  unrhymed  verse.  These  he  can  write 
with  swiftness,  passion  and  fervour,  as  witness  the  speeches 
of  Phaedra  and  Theseus  in  Aphrodite  Against  Artemis. 
Of  his  longer  poems,  however,  by  far  the  most  beautiful 
in  thought,  imagery  and  expression  is  the  allegorical  Pan's 
Prophecy,  which  interprets  in  dialogue  between  Pan  and 
Psyche  the  late-born  classic  myths  of  the  soul. 

His  shorter  lyrics  do  not  display  any  strongly-marked 
and  individual  features.  His  earliest  volume,  The  Vine- 
dresser, has  a  few  poems  that  linger  in  the  memory — 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          123 

'  Tempio  di  Venere  '  with  its  clear  observation  and  forcible 
rendering  of  a  scene,  '  Judith '  with  its  sustained  intensity, 
and  '  The  Sibyl.'  Some  of  Mr.  Moore's  experiments  in 
verse  are  uncalled  for  and  unfortunate.  The  attempt  to 
render  a  metrical  version  of  the  lament  of  David  over 
Saul  and  Jonathan  with  close  fidelity  to  the  words  of 
the  English  Bible  may  interest  the  author,  but  the  ordinary 
reader  only  gains  from  it  a  strengthened  belief  in  the 
inspiration  of  King  James's  translators.  Mr.  Sturge 
Moore  is  an  academic  and  literary  poet.  He  is  never 
closely  in  touch  with  the  life  of  a  real  world.  As  exercises 
in  verse  drawing  upon  the  author's  knowledge  of  classic 
myth  the  poems  doubtless  have  a  personal  meaning,  but 
few  are  likely  to  tempt  the  reader  a  second  time.  From 
this  statement  one  wise  and  beautiful  poem,  Paris 
Prophecy,  must  be  excluded. 

As  a  poet  Mr.  Sturge  Moore  writes  to  please  himself 
without  thought   of  readers  ;     he  is  untouched  by  any 

moods  or  phases  of  poetry  in  his  time, 
Hilaire  Belloc,  and  deserts  his  environment  for  realms 
b.  1870.  of  legend  and  myth  where  he  may  write 

poetry  in  vacuo.  Save  for  a  certain 
affinity  to  the  writing  of  Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett  his  work 
bears  little  family  likeness  to  the  aims  and  ideals  of  other 
poets  of  to-day  ;  and  it  is  therefore  possible  to  turn  from 
him  to  write  of  two  journalistic  poets,  Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc 
and  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton,  without  attempting  any 
sequence  in  ideas.  Readers  acquainted  only  with  the 
later  Mr.  Belloc,  whom  we  have  come  to  know  in  the 
twentieth  century,  will  meet  with  surprises  in  opening 
the  curious  little  volume  of  Verses  and  Sonnets  (1895) 
printed  on  thick  cardboard.  Three  diminutive  lyrics  of 
no  importance  open  the  book,  eight  insignificant  sonnets 
in  Shakespearean  and  other  forms  follow,  and  only  then 
do  we  reach  the  section  named  (without  reason  for  the 
most  part)  '  Grotesques,'  in  which  first  we  meet  with 
that  nimbleness  of  wit  and  fancy,  that  charm  and  dis- 
tinction in  the  use  of  English  associated  with  Mr.  Belloc' s 
later  prose  and  verse.  But  no  volume  as  a  whole  could 
promise  less  than  this,  save  in  the  humour  of  the  '  Gro- 
tesques,' a  humour  which  has  since  been  put  to  better 
use  in  books  of  verse  for  children. 


124  POETRY  [PART  i 

Fifteen  years  elapsed  before  Mr.  Belloc  published  Verses 
(1910),  another  small  collection  of  miscellaneous  poems. 
The  humorous  and  satirical  verse  is  good,  but  the  greater 
part  of  this  volume  would  scarcely  justify  us  in  speaking 
of  Mr.  Belloc  as  a  poet :  it  is  only  when  inspired  by  his 
two  great  themes,  Sussex  and  beer,  that  he  reaches  a 
higher  level.  There  are  here  three  fine  drinking  songs  ; 
but  in  two  poems,  '  Stanzas  Written  on  Battersea  Bridge  ' 
and  '  The  South  Country,'  he  far  surpasses  anything  else 
he  has  printed  in  verse.  '  The  South  Country  '  has  all  the 
artlessness  and  pictorial  effect  gained  by  simplest  means 
belonging  to  the  true  ballad.  It  is  an  infinite  pity  that 
Mr.  Belloc  has  not  found  it  in  him  to  give  us  more  poems 
like  this.  For  in  it  he  reaches  in  verse  the  poetic  roman- 
ticism, the  naive  inconsequence  which  lend  so  great  a 
delight  and  charm  to  the  prose  of  The  Path  to  Rome  and 
The  Four  Men.  In  '  The  South  Country  '  there  is  the  true 
ingenuousness  of  poetry,  a  use  of  simple  and  good  English, 
a  clear  eye  for  effects  and  contrasts,  and  an  arrestive 
melody  which  mark  Mr.  Belloc  as  capable  of  better  poetry 
than  any  he  has  yet  written. 

In  many  points  Mr.  Belloc  and  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton 
are  the  natural  complement  of  each  other — journalists, 
democrats,  optimists,  prophets  to  their 
G.  K.  Chesterton,  age,  confident  and  untiring  in  asserting 
b.  1874.  the  traditional  faith,  Roman  in  the  one 

case,  Anglican  in  the  other.  Mr.  Belloc, 
however,  has  the  finer  literary  sense,  a  charm  of  exquisite 
style,  and  he  avoids  the  affectations  and  poses  of  Mr. 
Chesterton.  To  the  majority  of  thoughtless  readers  the 
latter  is  known  as  a  brilliant  journalist  who  executes  upon 
the  carpet  amazing  contortions  in  paradox,  as  an  essayist 
upon  all  and  nothing  and  as  a  writer  of  fantastic  novels. 
His  mechanical  production  of  paradox  by  restating  any 
ordinary  truism  upside  down  is  stimulating  for  a  time, 
but  it  grows  a  dreary  habit  with  frequent  iteration.  Yet 
it  would  be  idle  to  deny  him  a  genius  for  ideas  ;  and  in 
his  better  mood  as  a  critic  of  literature  he  possesses  an 
acuteness  and  clearness  of  insight  shared  by  few.  He  has 
written  an  admirable  critical  monograph  on  Browning, 
an  introduction  to  a  book  of  selections  from  Thackeray 
which  contains  some  of  the  best  observations  ever  made 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          125 

on  the  greatest  of  Victorian  novelists,  a  small  book  on 
Victorian  literature  which  illuminates  the  work  of  in- 
dividual writers  if  it  gives  little  idea  of  the  period  as  a 
whole,  and  he  has  championed  Dickens  against  the  dis- 
paragements of  an  age  which  discountenances  imagination 
in  favour  of  industrious  observation.  And,  further,  Mr. 
Chesterton  is  a  poet :  his  highest  literary  achievement  is 
his  Ballad  of  the  White  Horse. 

But  eleven  years  earlier  he  published  a  volume  of 
individual  and  characteristic  verse,  The  Wild  Knight  and 
Other  Poems  (1900).  Here  are  ideas  and  original  ideas, 
paradoxes,  a  message,  optimism  and  a  masculine  faith 
in  the  goodness  of  being  alive.  The  men  of  the  'nineties 
were  aweary  of  this  great  world  ;  Mr.  Chesterton  suffers 
from  no  megrims  of  disillusion.  Typical  of  his  philosophy 
of  life  are  the  words  of  his  noble  tribute  to  Gladstone  : 

"  If  we  must  say,  '  No  more  his  peer 

Cometh  ;  the  flag  is  furled.' 
Stand  not  too  near  him,,  lest  he  hear 
That  slander  on  the  world." 

'  The  Wild  Knight,'  the  longest  poem  of  the  volume, 
after  opening  with  a  passage  of  fine  imaginative  poetry, 
subsides  into  confused  allegorical  dialogue.  Save  for  its 
opening  lines  it  is  inferior  to  many  of  the  shorter  poems. 
In  common  with  them  it  teaches  that  God's  in  His  heaven 
and  all's  right  with  the  world.  But  a  poem  that  stirs 
and  starts  the  blood  in  the  veins  is  the  splendidly  grotesque 
soliloquy  of  '  The  Donkey.' 

"  The  tattered  outlaw  of  the  earth, 

Of  ancient  crooked  will ; 
Starve,  scourge,  deride  me  :  I  am  dumb, 
I  keep  my  secret  still. 

"  Fools  !     For  I  also  had  my  hour ; 
One  far  fierce  hour  and  sweet : 
There  was  a  shout  about  my  ears, 
And  palms  before  my  feet." 

This  is  the  poetry  of  inspiration.  Nevertheless,  little  in 
the  early  volume  can  compare  with  The  Ballad  of  the 
White  Horse.  (1911),  a  long  poem  written  with  a  genius 
for  catching  the  spirited  adventurousness  of  the  folk- 


126  POETRY  [PART  i 

ballad,  and  only  marred  by  the  intrusive  didacticism  with 
which  Mr.  Chesterton  preaches  the  faith  that  is  in  him 
— the  blessing  of  Christianity  and  the  nihilism  of  the 
pagan,  the  ancient  equivalent  of  the  modern  agnostic. 
The  story  of  the  ballad  is  King  Alfred's  deliverance  of 
the  land  from  the  Norseman  ;  but,  despite  his  victory, 
the  King  predicts  a  time  when  the  heathen  shall  come 
back,  not  in  the  guise  of  manly  and  savage  barbarians,  but 
mild  and  shaven  "  ordering  all  things  with  dead  words," 
breaking  the  heart  and  hope  of  the  world,  ruining  and 
making  dark.  For  it  is  the  faith  of  Mr.  Chesterton  that — 

"  The  men  of  the  East  may  spell  the  stars, 

And  times  and  triumphs  mark, 
But  the  men  signed  of  the  cross  of  Christ 
Go  gaily  in  the  dark." 

To  Mr.  Chesterton,  as  to  other  men  of  letters  in  this  day 
of  doctrinal  literature,  must  be  allowed  his  gospel  of 
salvation.  The  Ballad  of  the  White  Horse  is  not,  however, 
a  mere  allegory  of  the  conquest  of  weary  agnosticism  by 
joyous  Christianity  ;  it  would  remain  a  ringing  and  stirring 
poem  were  its  message  omitted.  Mr.  Chesterton  essays 
no  elaborate  archaic  artifices,  no  hypertrophied  devices  of 
melody ;  he  does  not  throughout  cling  to  the  same 
measure,  but  in  the  swing  and  spirit  of  the  poem  he  has 
without  labour  won  the  manner  of  the  true  ballad.  It 
is  as  spontaneous  and  unforced  as  one  of  Scott's  lays. 
The  style  is  simple  and  of  few  words,  the  narrative  almost 
rollicks  on  its  way  ;  but,  again  like  Scott,  Mr.  Chesterton 
has  imbued  his  high-spirited  ballad  with  the  atmosphere 
of  a  national  epic.  It  is  one  of  the  few  long  narrative 
poems  of  the  last  two  decades  which  can  be  read  a  second 
time.  It  contains  hardly  any  subtleties  or  abstract  images, 
and  this  is  well,  for  Mr.  Chesterton,  when  he  forgets  his 
message,  remembers  that  he  is  writing  a  narrative  poem 
on  an  historical  subject.  And  it  has  pre-eminently  in  its 
narrative  the  fine  objective  manner  of  the  old  ballad 
and  carol,  a  virtue  almost  lost  to  the  mind  of  an  intro- 
spective age. 

The  poets  of  man  are  born  more  often  than  the  true 
and  simple  poets  of  nature.  Nearly  every  rhymester 
makes  his  first  essays  with  descriptions  of  skies,  hills, 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          127 

woodlands  and  meadows,  but  like  Whitman  he  discovers 
the  difficulty  of  omitting  the  "  stock  poetical  touches," 
and  a  great  part  of  nature  poetry  resolves  itself  into  a 
fresh  arrangement  of  well-worn  phrases  and  lines.  Loving 
observation  of  nature  and  constant  intercourse  with  her 
will  not  suffice  to  create  poetry.  Wordsworth  was  a 
great  poet  of  nature  not  because  he  loved  her  more 
passionately  than  others,  but  because  he  was  more  often 
stirred  to  high  feeling.  He  would  have  been  a  poet  had 
circumstance  bound  him  all  his  life  to  a  mean  street  in 
London,  although  he  would  have  chosen  other  subjects 
than  were  suggested  to  him  by  the  Lake  Country.  To 
few  belongs  the  gift  of  deep  and  simple  sincerity  in  feeling, 
without  which  nature  poetry  can  be  no  more  than  an 
iteration  of  thoughts  already  better  conceived  and  more 
strongly  expressed.  Dean  Beeching  and  Mr.  A.  C.  Benson 
find  joy  in  the  peaceful  seclusion  of  gardens  and  the  spring 
beauty  of  country  lanes.  They  express  their  thought  in 
creditable  verse,  but  the  swift  and  sudden  illumination 
that  comes  of  an  emotion  heartfelt  and  grounded  deep 
in  life  rarely  if  ever  visits  them.  In  Mr.  Norman  Gale  we 
are  often  conscious  of  an  emotion  that  is  unsought  and 
discovers  itself  in  sincere  poetry ;  and  more  often  are  we 
conscious  of  this  in  Mr.  A.  E.  Housman's  Shropshire  Lad, 
which  contains  some  of  the  noblest  and  simplest  nature 
poetry  in  English.  And  to  these  names  may  now  be 
added  those  of  two  sincere  and  individual  poets  of  nature 
who  began  to  write  but  a  few  years  since.  The  rare 
beauty  of  the  poetry  of  Mr.  Alfred  .Williams  and  Mr.  W.  H. 
Davies  is  a  cause  of  astonishment  when  we  learn  the  story 
of  their  early  lives.  They  are  both  born  of  the  people, 
they  have  both  passed  through  years  of  poverty  and 
hard  struggle,  and  neither  has  been  embittered  by  the 
past  or  lost  the  gracious  sense  of  joy  in  living. 

Mr.  Alfred  Williams  became  a  farm-boy  at  eleven  and 

at  fourteen  a  rivet-lad  in  the  railway  works  at  Swindon. 

At  twenty  he  began  to  read  and  by 

Alfred  Williams,        incessant  work,   early  in  the  morning 

b.  1877.  and  late  at  night,  he  succeeded  not  only 

in  gaining  a  good  knowledge  of  English 

poetry  but  in  teaching  himself  to  read  Latin,  Greek  and 

French.     His  first  verses  to  see  the  light  were  printed  in 


128  POETRY  [PART  i 

a  miscellaneous  anthology,  and  then  in  1909  he  published 
Songs  in  Wiltshire.  This  was  followed  by  Poems  in  Wilt- 
shire (1911)  and  Nature  and  Other  Poems  (1912).  Mr. 
Williams,  although  his  sympathy  is  with  the  simple  daily 
round  of  the  ploughman  and  the  village  wife,  though  life 
on  the  soil  is  for  him  the  ideal  of  existence,  is  too  deeply 
steeped  in  literature  to  be  a  poet  of  the  people,  writing 
in  their  dialect  like  a  Barnes  or  a  Burns.  Probably  he 
would  never  have  written  poetry  had  he  not  been  inspired 
by  the  love  of  books  and  set  himself,  at  immense  cost, 
to  acquire  culture.  And  the  range  of  his  knowledge  is  not 
bounded  by  matters  purely  literary.  In  his  delightful 
prose  book,  A  Wiltshire  Village  (1912),  he  shows  an  intimate 
acquaintance  with  the  geological  history  of  the  county  he 
loves,  its  present  life,  its  streams,  hills,  flora  and  the  fishes 
caught  in  any  particular  reach  of  the  rivers.  His  know- 
ledge and  his  powers  of  observation  are  individual  and 
peculiar  to  himself ;  his  passion  for  the  open  air  is  as 
sincere  as  Whitman's  ;  it  is  not  the  pose  of  the  poet  who, 
never  leaving  his  study,  sings  the  joy  of  the  winding  road 
and  the  lone  sea  beach.  Echoes  of  Shelley,  Meredith, 
Whitman  are  not  wanting  in  Mr.  Williams'  poetry  ;  but 
he  utters  as  his  own  the  thoughts  that  have  stirred  us 
before.  All  his  writing  is  strong,  simple,  sane  ;  it  has  no 
affectations  and  betrays  none  of  the  assertive  arrogance 
or  crudities  so  often  to  be  found  in  the  self-educated  man. 
The  frank  and  unassuming  naturalness  of  expression  in 
these  poems  is  one  of  their  high  merits.  The  '  Wiltshire 
Song,'  'The  Blackbird's  Canticle,'  'A  Woman's  Face,' 
the  '  Rustic  Song '  and  '  On  the  Downs  '  are  all  outstanding 
poems  ;  but  in  joy  of  song  none  surpasses  '  In  the  Meadow.' 
When  Mr.  Williams  writes — 

"  Let  the  round  world  shoot  and  pass 

With  its  sorrow  and  its  sin, 
Like  a  shattered  globe  of  glass 

And  the  latter  fear  begin  ; 
For  ever,  ever,  ever, 

As  the  crimson-flowing  wine, 
Thou  wilt  blossom,  O  my  soul ! 

With  the  rose  and  eglantine." 

he  may  be  thinking  of  Shelley,  perhaps  of  Davidson,  and 
the  analogy  of  the  "  crimson-flowing  wine  "  has  no  relation 


CHAP,  in]       PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          129 

to  the  imagery  of  the  stanza  ;   but  there  is  something  here 
that  rises  from  the  very  sources  of  poetry. 

The  power  and  beauty  of  Mr.  Williams'  thought  grow, 
and  with  his  practice  in  self-expression  he  learns  to  avoid 
some  of  the  crudities  inevitable  at  the  first.  But  the 
second  and  third  volumes  are  chiefly  remarkable  for  their 
deeper  content  and  clearer  reflection  of  the  poet's  per- 
sonality. '  Natural  Thoughts  and  Surmises  '  in  the  earlier 
volume  and  '  The  Testament '  in  the  second  are  the  most 
intimate  and  complete  confession  of  his  close  communion 
with  nature.  In  sincerity,  fidelity  of  observation,  in  the 
felicitous  use  of  words  and  in  largeness  of  outline  these 
poems  are  noteworthy.  The  rough  and  unrhymed  verse 
in  which  they  are  written  fetches  its  being  from  Leaves 
of  Grass,  but  Mr.  Williams  writes  it  in  his  own  way  with 
greater  regularity  and  more  restraint  than  Whitman.  And 
he  has  no  need  to  eschew  rhyme  on  account  of  its  diffi- 
culties, for  he  can  write  lyrics  in  the  familiar  measures 
beautifully  and  melodiously.  He  has  the  vision  of  the 
poet,  he  can  express  himself  in  words  and  thoughts 
which  are  none  the  less  his  own  because  they  are  some- 
times coloured  by  his  knowledge  of  the  literature  of 
several  languages  ;  and  in  these  poems  we  never  lose  our 
touch  with  the  simple,  sincere  and  self-contained  per- 
sonality of  the  author.  His  inspiration  is  far  from  unfail- 
ing, but  he  rarely  writes  as  ineffectively  as  he  does  in 
'  Julia  and  Margaret.'  In  the  majority  of  these  poems 
restraint  and  unassuming  truthfulness  are  united  to  a 
very  real  gift  of  song.  Mr.  Williams'  writing  is  arresting, 
it  has  the  note  of  personal  reflection  and  personal  utter- 
ance, despite  the  many  traces  of  literary  influence.  He 
is  one  among  the  few  true  poets  of  nature. 

It  needs  only  that  a  bath-chair  man  or  a  sempstress 
should  write  a  book  and  succeed  in  bringing  it  into  notice 

and  the  world  will  read  avidly,  sur- 
William  H.  Davies,  prised  that  the  book  should  be  written 
b.  1870.  at  all.  The  extravagant  praise  which 

greeted  Mr.  W.  H.  Davies  on  the 
appearance  of  his  first  book,  The  Soul's  Destroyer  (1907), 
was  due  less  to  the  merit  of  his  poetry  than  the  interest 
of  his  story,  which  had  spread  abroad.  After  years 
spent  as  a  tramp  in  America  he  lost  one  foot  in  an 


130  POETRY  [PART  i 

accident  and  came  back  to  England  to  quarter  himself  in 
doss-houses  and  write  poetry.  Mr.  Davies'  story  was 
romantic  ;  but  this  did  not  justify  foolish  over-praise  of 
his  verse.  He  was  compared  to  James  Thomson  (B.V.), 
Crabbe,  Wordsworth,  the  Elizabethans,  and  described  as 
"  a  lord  of  language."  Comment  is  needless.  In  his  first 
collection  those  poems  of  the  doss-house,  '  Saints  and 
Lodgers '  and  the  reverie,  '  The  Lodging-house  Fire ' 
contain  good  writing,  but  the  blank  verse  '  Soul's 
Destroyer '  is  metrically  monotonous,  and,  beyond 
betraying  a  genuine  feeling  for  natural  beauty,  it  has 
small  vestige  of  the  stronger  emotion  of  poetry.  And 
vulgarisms — for  example  the  poet's  notice  of  the  bird 
that  "  twittered  some  "  — which  can  never  be  made  into 
poetry  are  unpardonable  even  in  a  tramp-poet.  The  one 
poem  of  distinction  in  this  volume  is  '  The  Lodging-house 
Fire.'  The  stanza — 

"  No  man  lives  life  so  wise 
But  unto  Time  he  throws 
Morsels  to  hunger  for 
At  his  life's  close," 

is  an  astonishing  example  of  concentration  in  thought 
and  expression.  In  New  Poems  (1907)  and  Nature  Poems 
(1908)  he  uses  to  far  better  purpose  the  two  faculties 
that  chiefly  are  his — a  vision  of  beauty  and  happiness  in 
life  and  nature  as  clear  and  direct  as  the  child's  and  an 
unfailing  strain  of  effortless  song.  Nearly  all  his  poems 
are  fresh,  springing  from  a  mind  which  sees  the  world 
not  as  others  see,  but  individually.  Women  and  children, 
bird-song  and  sunset,  ale  and  the  vagrant  life,  the 
characters  of  doss-house  and  slum — of  these  he  sings  for 
the  joy  and  interest  of  seeing  and  feeling.  And  he  wisely 
forswears  cumbering  his  poetry  with  intellectualisms. 
There  is  nothing  sophisticated  in  his  thought  or  style. 
In  restrained  simplicity  he  is  sometimes  not  far  from 
Wordsworth,  in  the  fleeting  beauty  of  his  word-music 
not  unlike  Herrick.  And  the  next  two  volumes,  Farewell 
to  Poesy  (1910)  and  Songs  of  Joy  (1911),  exhibit  even 
greater  gain  in  melody  and  felicitous  simplicity.  Perhaps 
in  Foliage  (1913)  he  sings  a  little  less  spontaneously  of 
the  themes  from  which  he  rarely  departs,  but  his  poems 


CHAP,  in]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          131 

retain  their  charm  of  artless  grace  in  imagery  and  style. 
Mr.  Davies'  genius  as  a  poet  is  limited  ;  he  has  neither 
the  strength  nor  intellectual  force  of  Mr.  Williams,  nor 
can  he  successfully  embark  on  a  long  poem.  He  has  no 
message,  no  strong  thought  for  his  generation.  He  is 
content  if  he  may  sing  in  his  own  words  the  changeless 
and  simple  facts  of  life  and  nature,  and  he  rarely  fails  to 
render  these  sincerely  and  with  a  clear  music. 

If  the  genius  of  Mr.  W.  H.  Davies  is  spontaneously 
lyrical  Mr.  John  Drinkwater  is  to  be  counted  with  the 

elegiac  poets,  and  he  sometimes  reminds 
John  Drinkwater,  us  of  Sir  William  Watson.  His  verse 
b.  1882.  is  intellectual  and  meditative.  His 

later  writing  impresses  us  with  a  con- 
sciousness of  contact  with  a  strong  and  thoughtful  nature, 
and  it  is,  therefore,  surprising  to  discover  the  poverty 
of  his  first  efforts  in  poetry.  Poems  (1903)  contains  wholly 
unoriginal  verse  written  in  simple  metres,  and  is  often 
mildly  pious  in  thought.  In  The  Death  of  Leander  (1906) 
Mr.  Drinkwater  is  more  articulate  ;  but  the  volume  holds 
nothing  to  arrest  the  reader's  attention.  Some  of  the 
shorter  poems  treat,  in  a  quite  conventional  manner, 
the  modern  man's  religious  difficulties.  There  is  little 
tunefulness  in  either  of  these  collections.  But  Avith 
the  volume  of  Lyrical  and  Other  Poems  (1908)  Mr. 
Drinkwater  showed  a  great  advance  in  melody,  com- 
mand of  thought  and  language.  The  two  earlier  volumes 
were  utterly  uninteresting,  of  the  third  the  last  thing 
that  could  be  said  is  that  the  writing  is  common- 
place or  comes  from  a  common  mind.  The  address  to 
'  Shakespeare  '  is  a  noble  ode,  the  4  June  Dance  '  is  worthy 
the  beautiful  month  it  celebrates,  and  the  sonnets, 
'  Supplication  '  and  '  Edinburgh,'  are  evidence  that  Mr. 
Drinkwater  has  been  studying  the  technique  of  poetry 
to  good  purpose.  In  the  two  succeeding  volumes,  not 
very  appositely  named  Poems  of  Men  and  Hours  (1911) 
and  Poems  of  Love  and  Earth  (1912),  the  growth  of  his 
power  is  proportionately  maintained.  The  opening 
'  Prayer  '  of  the  first  of  these  two  volumes  is  an  impressive 
poem  both  in  breadth  of  composition  and  grave  dignity 
of  utterance.  Here  we  find  beyond  mistake  the  earnest 
and  high  emotion  of  poetry — 


182  POETRY  [PART  i 

"  Knowledge  we  ask  not — knowledge  Thou  hast  lent, 
But,  Lord,  the  will — there  lies  our  bitter  need, 
Give  us  to  build  above  the  deep  intent 
The  deed,  the  deed." 

*  For  They  Have  Need,'  and  indeed  nearly  all  the  other 
poems  of  the  volume  are  informed  with  the  same  gravity 
and  earnestness.  And  the  observation  applies  with  almost 
equal  truth  to  Poems  of  Love  and  Earth,  save  for  a  few 
high-spirited  and  happy-hearted  poems  like  '  The  Vaga- 
bond '  and  the  inconsequent  '  Feckenham  Men.'  In  '  The 
Fires  of  God '  he  returns  to  the  long  philosophic  poem 
with  far  greater  success  than  in  his  first  attempts  ;  and 
the  brief  elegy  to  Tolstoy  is  only  brought  short  of  success 
by  its  brevity.  In  his  Cromwell  and  Other  Poems  (1913) 
the  sequence  of  poems  in  varied  metres  entitled  '  Crom- 
well '  witnesses  to  Mr.  Drinkwater's  command  of  a  finely 
chosen  vocabulary,  but  his  lines  are  stiff  and  pedantic, 
and  in  seeking  to  reach  an  epic  largeness  he  has  in  a  great 
measure  missed  the  sources  of  poetry.  Several  of  the 
shorter  poems,  and  especially  '  In  Lady  Street '  and 
'  Travel  Talk,'  are  more  characteristic  of  his  genius  as  a 
poet  of  restrained  gravity  and  moral  earnestness. 

Mr.  Drinkwater  is  less  at  his  ease  in  lyric  than  in 
elegiac,  meditative  and  hortatory  verse.  His  lyrics  have 
a  grave  intention  which  differentiates  them  from  a  flow 
of  unpremeditated  song.  And  he  uses  English  with 
restraint  and  respect.  He  is  never  tempted  to  astonish 
with  exuberance  of  language  or  plethora  of  imagery. 
He  writes  directly  and  always  uses  the  most  obvious 
and  natural  word  for  the  expression  of  his  thought.  The 
bent  of  his  temperament  is  to  the  ethical  and  intellectual, 
and  neither  imagination  nor  emotion  carries  him  away. 
Although  he  betrays  no  intimate  knowledge  of  classical 
poetry  he  is  formal  and  classical  by  instinct.  It  is  the 
failing  of  poets  who  write  in  the  mood  of  elegy  that  after 
a  few  years  intellect  overpowers  the  emotions,  talent 
replaces  genius  and  inspiration  is  withdrawn.  In  his  later 
volumes  Mr.  Drinkwater  has  reached  a  consistently 
high  level  of  elegiac  and  rhetorical  verse,  but  his  attain- 
ment has  been  a  little  monotonously  even.  If  he  does 
not  halt  uncertainly  nor  lapse  into  the  commonplace, 


CHAP,  m]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          133 

equally  he  is  without  the  magic  of  a  quickened  in- 
spiration. 

Three  poets  to  whom  the  gifts  of  lyricism,  song  and  fancy 
in  varying  mood  and  form  have  been  given,  remain  to  be 
noted  before  the  close  of  this  section.  The  eldest  of  the 
three,  Mr.  Walter  de  la  Mare,  beginning  later  in  life  than 
the  younger  two,  is  still  writing,  whereas  James  Elroy 
Flecker  and  Rupert  Brooke  died  within  a  few  months  of 
each  other  in  1915. 

Mr.  Walter  de  la  Mare  (Walter  Ramal)  when  he  began 
to  publish  his  work  in  volume  form  was  approaching  the 
fourth  decade  of  his  life,  but  he  is  the 
Walter  de  la  Mare,  singer  of  a  young  and  romantic  world, 
b.  1873.  a  singer  even  for  children,  understanding 

and  perceiving  as  a  child.  In  one  sense 
the  sum  of  his  work  is  small  and  his  province  narrow ; 
for  he  is  least  successful  in  what  he  may  himself,  at  one 
time,  have  regarded  as  his  more  ambitious  poems,  in  his 
laboured  '  Characters  from  Shakespeare,'  in  the  blank 
verse  essays  on  '  Youth  '  and  '  The  Voice  of  Melancholy,' 
and  (with  some  exception)  in  the  sonnets.  These  belong 
to  Poems  (1906),  which  holds  less  that  is  born  of  the 
author's  true  genius  than  his  other  volumes,  suggesting 
the  result  of  an  earnest  will  and  intention  to  compose 
poetry  on  set  themes  rather  than  a  poetry  of  the  heart 
and  mind.  One  or  two  pieces  have  a  more  personal  note, 
but  they  are  not  sufficient  in  themselves  to  give  an 
individuality  to  the  collection.  Two  songs  of  the  sea — 
of  which  Mr.  Walter  de  la  Mare  never  fails  to  write  with 
the  passion  of  a  lover — '  The  Seas  of  England  '  and  the 
sonnet,  '  Sea-magic '  and  a  few  other  verses  are  in  his 
true  manner  ;  but,  taken  as  a  whole,  Poems  hardly  ranks 
in  the  direct  succession  of  his  work. 

Songs  of  Childhood  (1902),  a  collection  passing  from 
nursery  ditty  through  whimsical  fancy  to  gay  or  tender 
lyric  and  song,  is  representative  of  the  author's  real 
genius  ;  and  in  the  same  mode,  with  increasing  charm 
and  beauty,  followed  The  Listeners  (1912)  and  Peacock 
Pie  (1913).  Songs  of  the  nursery  and  childhood,  graceful 
fancies,  the  slightest  of  lyrics,  unthinkingly  happy  or  wist- 
fully dreaming  on  things  past  and  never  to  return,  such 
is  the  content  of  these  books.  Grace  and  fleeting  music 


184  POETRY  [PART  i 

of  words,  sometimes  like  Shakespeare's  songs  of  little 
meaning  in  themselves,  are  the  true  realm  of  Mr.  Walter 
de  la  Mare's  delicate  fancy.  And  when  he  attempts 
nothing  more  than  a  tender  conceit  or  a  day-dream  light 
as  the  sea-foam  and  bright  as  the  sun  on  glancing  water 
his  genius  never  deserts  him.  The  greater  things  he  has 
fortunately  learned  to  set  aside  in  the  two  volumes  last 
named,  and,  wisely  limiting  himself  to  his  reach,  he  has 
shaped  flawlessly  his  fairy  songs  and  happy  fancies.  But, 
if  grace  and  charm  are  his  distinguishing  characteristics, 
they  are  not  the  whole  ;  in  a  few  words,  seemingly  artless 
and  unsought,  he  can  express  a  pathos  or  a  hope  as  wide 
as  man's  life.  '  An  Epitaph  '  is  but  eight  lines  in  length, 
but  greater  poets  have  often  said  less  in  as  many  pages. 

"  Here  lies  a  most  beautiful  lady, 
Light  of  step  and  heart  was  she  ; 
I  think  she  was  the  most  beautiful  lady 
That  ever  was  in  the  West  Country. 
But  beauty  vanishes  ;  beauty  passes  ; 
However  rare — rare  it  be  ; 
And  when  I  crumble,  who  will  remember 
This  lady  of  the  West  Country  ?  " 

Further  illustration,  where  so  much  is  perfect  within  its 
intention,  will  serve  no  good  purpose.  In  The  Listeners 
may  be  read  verses  as  varied  as  the  pathos  of  '  Never 
More,  Sailor '  and  '  The  Stranger,'  the  bizarre  fanciful- 
ness  of  '  The  Scarecrow,'  the  moving  sadness  and  beauty 
of  '  All  That's  Past,'  or  the  grace  of  '  The  Three  Cherry 
Trees.'  And  Peacock  Pie  has  no  page  without  a  rare 
delight  and  charm,  from  the  little  ditties  of '  Up  and  Down  ' 
to  the  beautiful  nature  poems  of  '  Earth  and  Air  '  and  the 
closing  '  Songs.' 

The  poetry  of  Rupert  Brooke  is  a  poetry  of  youth  and 
romance  :    not  the  romance  of  the  distant,  the  bizarre, 

the  remote,  but  the  romance  of  the  actual 
Rupert  Brooke,  and  its  adventurous  discovery.  No 
1887-1915.  characteristic  of  Brooke's  poetry  is  more 

marked  than  its  valiant  and  happy 
youthfulness,  tinged  not  infrequently  with  that  sceptical 
irony  and  half-affected  cynicism  not  less  indicative  of  the 
young  man's  uncertainty  both  of  life  and  himself.  The 


CHAP,  in]        PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES        135 

young  poet  who,  like  Shelley,  Keats,  or,  it  may  be  added, 
Flecker,  lives  in  the  world  of  the  transcendental  and 
mythical  is  secured  against  his  little  knowledge  of  life  ; 
not  so  the  shielded  youth  who  affects  to  write  of  those 
things  which  can  only  be  seen  clearly  and  in  perspective 
when  life  has  ceased  to  be  a  venture  at  large.  And, 
because  of  an  affectation  beyond  the  measure  of  the  poet's 
wisdom  and  experience,  Rupert  Brooke's  first  volume  is  a 
fair  promise  rather  than  the  fulfilment  of  intention.  The 
manner  of  the  undergraduate  talking  of  the  world  he  is 
about  to  enter  is  never  far  distant ;  and  the  poetry,  with 
all  its  personal  touches  of  wit  and  irony,  remains  derivative 
and  experimental.  In  many  poems  he  followed  a  con- 
temporary tendency  to  a  rough  and  cynical  realism  in 
verse.  In  this  respect  '  Jealousy  '  and  several  other  pages 
of  Poems  (1911)  may  be  compared  to  the  work  of  Mr. 
James  Stephens,  although  Brooke  did  not  at  this  stage 
possess  the  originality  in  humour,  philosophy  of  life  and 
knowledge  of  human  character  belonging  to  Mr.  Stephens. 
None  of  these  poems,  save  for  an  interest  in  the  author, 
will  recall  the  reader  a  second  time.  More  indicative  of 
the  true  poet  that  was  to  be  are  the  quasi-philosophical 
poems  of  this  volume,  which  treat,  if  not  always  very 
intelligibly,  with  a  manner  that  is  personal  and  unaffected 
the  mysteries  of  life  and  death.  Brooke's  first  volume 
had,  at  least,  the  merit  of  unconventionality  :  and  in  his 
rough-hewn,  sometimes  whimsical  poems  he  tried,  not 
always  successfully,  to  avoid  manufacturing  verses  and 
express  what  he  felt. 

Three  years  and  a  few  months  of  life  were  left  to 
Rupert  Brooke  after  the  publication  of  this  first  volume 
of  poetry,  three  years  memorable  in  his  brief  story.  In 
1913  he  was  elected  a  fellow  of  King's  College,  Cambridge, 
and  in  the  same  year  he  left  England  to  travel  by  the 
United  States  and  Canada  to  the  South  Seas.  To  this 
journey  we  owe  not  only  the  prose  Letters  from  America 
(1916)  and  the  warm  and  sunlit  poems  of  the  South  Seas, 
but,  in  some  part  at  least,  the  whole  difference  between 
his  writing  before  the  end  of  1911  and  that  day  of  April, 
1915,  when  he  laid  down  his  young  life  for  his  country, 
not  the  less  truly  because  his  death  was  not  in  the  open 
field.  Other  influences  had  also  been  at  work — life  in 


136  POETRY  [PART  i 

London,  and  in  the  last  months  the  outbreak  of  the 
great  war — to  make  1914  and  Other  Poems  (1915)  a 
volume  of  English  poetry  not  less  rapturously  youthful 
than  the  first,  but  wise  also  and  grave.  Even  the  old 
ironies  have  become  tender  and  wistful,  as  witness  the 
sonnet  entitled  '  Unfortunate '  and  the  haunting  '  Chilterns.' 
In  melody  and  range  of  expression  Brooke  gained  im- 
measurably in  these  years.  '  Tiare  Tahiti '  and  '  The 
Great  Lover '  have  a  music  and  a  cadence  which  set 
them  far  above  his  early  work :  and,  in  another  mode, 
the  handling  of  the  octosyllabic  couplets  of  the  spirited 
'  Old  Vicarage  :  Grantchester  '  is  admirable.  The  promise, 
not  always  certain,  has  been  more  than  redeemed  in  this 
posthumous  collection  of  poems,  which  is  likely  to  endure 
with  the  best  that  has  been  written  in  recent  years.  Of 
Rupert  Brooke  it  may  be  said  that  he  not  only  added 
to,  he  enriched  English  poetry  in  his  slender  volume  and 
English  sonnets  with  the  brief  series  inspired  by  the  war. 
Of  these  sonnets  one  is  both  prophetic  of  his  end  and  a 
character  of  the  true  poet  and  joyous  lover  of  beauty. 

"  If  I  should  die,  think  only  this  of  me  : 

That  there's  some  corner  of  a  foreign  field 
That  is  for  ever  England.     There  shall  be 

In  that  rich  earth  a  richer  dust  concealed ; 
A  dust  whom  England  bore,  shaped,  made  aware, 

Gave,  once,  her  flowers  to  love,  her  ways  to  roam, 
A  body  of  England's,  breathing  English  air, 

Washed  by  the  rivers,  blest  by  suns  of  home. 
And  think,  this  heart,  all  evil  shed  away, 

A  pulse  in  the  eternal  mind,  no  less 
Gives  somewhere  back  the  thoughts  by  England  given ; 

Her  sights  and  sounds  ;  dreams  happy  as  her  day ; 
And  laughter,  learnt  of  friends  ;  and  gentleness, 

In  hearts  at  peace,  under  an  English  heaven." 

James  Elroy  Flecker  was  peculiarly  a  poet  of  intel- 
lectualism,  who  regarded  himself  as  standing  for  a  classical 
reaction    against    the    common    ten- 
James  Elroy  Flecker,  dencies  of  English  poetry  in  his  day. 
1884-1915.  But  the  word  classical,   so  far  as  it 

has  any  longer  meaning  as  a  literary 
label,  allies  his  poetry  not  to  the  reasoned  and  elegiac 
forms  of  Matthew  Arnold  and  Sir  William  Watson,  but 


CHAP,  in]        PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES         137 

to  the  deliberate  craftsmanship  in  words  of  Keats  or  the 
French  Parnassians,  whom  especially  he  eulogised  and 
took  to  be  his  masters.  Among  English  poets  of  his 
own  generation  he  has,  thus,  a  place  to  himself.  His  ideal 
in  poetry  was  the  jewelled  phrase,  the  gem-like  verse,  the 
exquisitely  chiselled  stanza  or  poem  :  his  abhorrence  the 
preaching,  didactic,  fluently  romantic,  emotional  and 
sentimental  poets.  "  It  is  not,"  he  declared,  "  the  poet's 
business  to  save  man's  soul  but  to  make  it  worth  saving." 
It  was  his  belief  that  contemporary  English  poetry  could 
only  be  rescued  from  the  chaos  into  which,  as  it  appeared 
to  him,  it  was  falling,  through  the  poet's  ignorance  and 
the  absence  of  any  guiding  principle,  by  the  recognition 
that  genius  unaided  of  knowledge  was  as  prone  to  disaster 
as  in  everyday  life  emotion  without  strength  degenerates 
into  sentimentalism.  He  admitted  that  fine  poetry  had 
been  written  upon  no  theory  at  all  and  bad  poetry  com- 
posed upon  excellent  principles.  "  But,"  to  use  his  own 
words  from  the  preface  to  The  Golden  Journey  to  Samarkand, 
"  that  a  sound  theory  can  produce  sound  practice,  and 
exercise  a  beneficent  effect  upon  writers  of  genius,  has 
been  repeatedly  proved  in  the  short  but  glorious  history 
of  the  '  Parnasse.'  ' 

It  was  not  at  once  that  Flecker  developed  his  theory, 
nor,  when  once  it  was  fully  present  to  his  mind,  can  it  be 
said  that  his  faith  and  practice  were  always  consistent. 
The  one  volume  representing  the  art  of  poetry  as  Flecker 
conceived  it,  The  Golden  Journey  to  Samarkand  (1913), 
was  preceded  by  The  Bridge  of  Fire  (1907)  and  Forty-two 
Poems  (1911).  The  Golden  Journey  is  not  only  the  pattern 
of  poetry  as  Flecker  wished  to  write,  it  illustrates  his 
affectation  of  a  love  of  the  East,  in  which  he  was  a  little 
disillusioned  by  his  short  experience  in  the  consular  service 
at  Constantinople  after  earlier  years  spent  at  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  and  in  teaching.  The  East  in  his  imagination, 
before  he  saw  it,  was  the  dreamland  of  the  Arabian  Nights, 
a  country  of  flaming  colours,  burning  sunlight,  the  exotic 
and  the  unreal ;  for  it  was  no  part  of  his  ideal  in  poetry 
to  transfigure  the  common  events  and  scenes  of  daily  life. 
He  laboured  rather,  even  more  than  Keats  and  Francis 
Thompson,  to  practise  his  art  for  its  own  sake,  using  words 
appealing  both  to  eye  and  ear,  avoiding  the  influences  of 


188  POETRY  [PART  i 

emotionalism  and  the  subject.  His  most  important 
volume  is  written  "  with  the  single  intention  of  creating 
beauty,"  not  to  reveal  the  poet's  mind  or  offer  any  reading 
of  life's  meaning. 

The  theory  adopted  by  Flecker  has  been  followed  more 
or  less  whole-heartedly  by  other  poets,  but  by  none  with 
an  entirely  faithful  allegiance,  for  it  neglects  wilfully 
the  complete  nature  of  man  ;  and  Flecker  is  not  more 
successful  than  those  who  went  before  him.  Inwoven 
damask  and  stiffly-figured  tapestries  can  only  be  a  lesser 
form  of  art :  in  the  end  the  craftsman  lapses  into  working 
by  design  and  rule,  unmoved  by  love  and  joy.  The  poet 
in  like  manner,  who  conceives  of  his  art  as  an  ornament, 
will  hardly  escape  unless,  as  is  most  probable,  he  is 
governed  only  intermittently  by  the  logic  of  his  theory. 

When  he  wrote  the  title-poem  of  The  Golden  Journey 
to  Samarkand  Flecker  had  his  theory  constantly  in  mind, 
and  the  poem,  despite  all  its  beauty  of  phrase,  fails  to 
give  more  than  a  transient  pleasure ;  for  the  poet's 
formula  is  writ  clear  and  the  evidence  of  composition  is 
plain. 

"  We  have  rose-candy,  we  have  spikenard, 
Mastic  and  terebinth  and  oil  and  spice, 
And  such  sweet  jams  meticulously  jarred 
As  God's  own  Prophet  eats  in  Paradise." 

Neither  the  manner  nor  the  wording  is  new  or  original ; 
others  have  affected  the  like  preciosity,  and  art  is  more 
than  a  cloying  sweetness.  In  a  similar  mood  of  intel- 
lectualism  Flecker  wrote  '  The  Gates  of  Damascus,'  '  In 
Phaeacia  '  and  other  poems  shaped  to  his  theory  :  but 
not  in  all  is  he  successful  in  maintaining  the  impersonality 
and  objectivity  of  his  ideal,  for  a  natural  emotion  will 
intrude  or  a  passing  sentiment. 

"Or  when  the  wind  beneath  the  moon  is  drifting  like  a  soul 

aswoon, 

And  harping  planets  talk  love's  tune  with  milky  wings  outspread, 
Yasmin, 

Shower  down  thy  love,  O  burning  bright !     For  one  night  or  the 

other  night 
Will  come  the  Gardener  in  white,  and  gathered  flowers  are  dead, 

Yasmin." 


CHAP.  HI]      PASSAGE  OF  THE  CENTURIES          139 

And  there  are  other  poems,  '  Oak  and  Olive  '  for  example, 
in  which  the  theory  is  frankly  abandoned  for  songs  of  the 
heart's  desire.  Further,  many  of  the  verses  collected  in 
The  Old  Ships  (1915),  including  the  fine  title-poem,  are 
undisguisedly  more  subjective  and  personal.  But  before 
all  the  poems  of  this  posthumously  published  booklet  had 
been  written  Europe  was  torn  asunder  ;  and  the  war  was 
not  without  its  influence  on  Flecker 's  writing,  as,  in 
especial,  the  noble  faith  and  hope  of  his  ode,  '  The  Burial 
in  England,'  bear  witness. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    POETESSES 

Laurence  Hope — Michael  Field — Mary   Coleridge — Rosamund  Marriott 
Watson — Lady  Margaret  Sackville — Ethel  Clifford. 

THE  nineteenth  century  witnessed  a  continuous  influx  of 
women  into  the  fields  of  fiction  and  poetry.  The  eighteenth 
century  was  far  from  being  without  its  women  writers, 
although  many  hid  themselves  behind  the  screen  of  a 
pseudonym ;  and  as  late  as  the  time  of  George  Eliot  and 
the  Brontes  it  was  generally  felt  to  be  but  natural  and 
becoming  for  a  woman  to  adopt  a  pen-name.  But  the 
greater  freedom  of  women's  lives  in  an  age  when  educa- 
tion, travel  and  social  intercourse  had  become  as  easy 
for  them  as  for  men,  led  to  an  enormous  increase  in 
the  number  of  poetesses  and  women  novelists,  and,  it 
may  be  added,  a  marked  improvement  in  the  quality  of 
their  work.  The  only  woman's  name  of  any  importance 
in  poetry  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  and  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  during  one  of  the  greatest 
periods  of  renaissance  in  English  poetry,  is  Joanna  Baillie, 
who  is  now  forgotten,  or  only  remembered  as  a  pale 
reflection  of  the  romantic  tendencies  of  the  time.  But 
before  her  death  Elizabeth  Barrett  and  Christina  Rossetti 
were  known  as  poetesses,  and  the  contrast  is  a  parable 
of  change,  for  the  volumes  of  Christina  Rossetti  right- 
fully take  their  place  with  the  nobler  and  greater  poetry 
of  the  period.  If,  however,  it  be  possible  to  strike  a 
general  average  in  poetry  and  fiction  during  the  last  half- 
century,  it  will  be  seen  that,  both  in  quality  and  quantity, 
women  attain  a  more  widely  distributed  and  lasting 
success  in  prose.  Apart  from  Mrs.  Browning  and  Christina 
Rossetti  there  are  no  poetesses  in  the  last  century  who 
can  presume  to  claim  an  equal  standing  with  the  greater 
poets  of  the  age.  And  mutatis  mutandis,  when  we  lower 

141 


142  POETRY  [PART  i 

our  scale,  it  remains  equally  true  that  the  poetry  which 
makes  a  difference,  shaping  the  courses  of  verse  in  recent 
years,  comes  from  men.  There  are  no  poetesses  to  place 
with  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  or  John 
Davidson.  Yet  modern  English  poetry  is  the  better,  and 
more  especially  lyric  song,  for  the  writing  of  women. 

The  work  of  two  poetesses,  Mrs.  Woods  and  Mrs. 
Meynell,  the  one  possessed  of  almost  masculine  strength, 
the  other  of  fragile  delicacy,  has  already  been  noticed. 
But  in  either  case  inspiration  is  fleeting  and  capricious, 
for  the  volume  of  their  verse  is  strangely  small :  and 
neither  poetess  suggests  abundant  resource.  This  is  not 
wholly  to  be  counted  to  their  discredit ;  for  careless  and 
indiscriminate  fluency  is  the  failing  of  many  women 
versifiers.  This  charge  cannot  be  brought  against  Laurence 
Hope,  Michael  Field,  Mary  Coleridge  and  Mrs.  Marriott 
Watson,  who  claim  places  of  distinction  and  honour  in 
the  story  of  poetry  within  the  last  quarter  of  a  century. 
And  each  follows  individual  aims,  betraying  little  if  any 
relation  to  the  others. 

The  passion  and  fire  of  Laurence  Hope's  lyric  inspira- 
tion is  astonishing.     An  element  of  the  voluptuous  has 
militated    against    her   fame,    but    it    is 
Laurence  Hope,        time  to  recognise  that  this  is  neither  the 
1865-1904.  reason    nor   ground   of  her   poetry,    for 

there  is  a  tenderness,  a  strength  and  a 
depth  of  feeling  in  many  of  her  poems  which  raise  them 
far  above  the  level  of  erotic  songs.  It  may  be  that  youth 
and  passionate  love  are  the  keynotes  of  her  poems  of 
the  East.  But  this  was  not  all :  and  as  she  wrote  she 
lived.  Laurence  Hope  (Mrs.  Adela  Florence  Nicholson) 
was  born  in  England,  but  in  1889  she  married  a  colonel 
in  the  Indian  army  and  settled  in  Madras.  The  capacity 
for  intense  passion  and  regret,  reflected  in  her  writings, 
was  illustrated  in  her  last  act,  suicide  by  poison  in  1904, 
two  months  after  her  husband's  death. 

Laurence  Hope  is  directly  descended  from  the  writers 
of  the  Yellow  Book  and  Savoy.  Her  background  is  different, 
but  in  psychological  subtlety  and  frankness  she  was 
nearer  to  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  than  any  other  modern 
poet.  The  atmosphere  and  environment  are  changed 
from  the  roaring  streets  and  flaring  lights  of  London  and 


CHAP,  iv]  THE  POETESSES  143 

Paris  to  the  burning  days  and  still  moonlight  nights  of  the 
Orient ;  but  in  essence  these  are  Western  poems,  as 
Western  as  Moore's  Lalla  Rookh.  Yet  nobody  has  trans- 
lated the  East  into  English  poetry  with  a  like  passion  and 
beauty.  Moore  and  the  vogue  he  established,  which  com- 
municated itself  even  to  Shelley,  need  not  be  taken  into 
account.  In  poetry  Sir  Alfred  Lyall  and  Sir  Edwin 
Arnold  are  largely  concerned  with  philosophic  concepts, 
and  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  sees  India  given  up  to  Tommy 
Atkins  and  the  English  civilian.  Laurence  Hope  com- 
municates the  spell  and  mysterious  fascination  of  the 
blue  skies  and  bronze  shadows  of  the  Orient,  its  vast 
inchoate  life,  its  silences,  the  age-old  habits  of  its  life 
and  thought,  its  perfumes,  its  passions,  hates,  loves  and 
the  transient  swiftness  of  its  youth.  But  the  pervasion  of 
her  lyrics  with  the  neurosis  of  sex  is  a  mode  of  the  Paris 
boulevard  and  the  ballet  stage  of  London.  By  far  the 
greater  number  of  Laurence  Hope's  poems  are  lyrics  of 
sexual  passion,  and  these  reflect  the  mind  of  the  West 
not  the  thought  of  the  East,  which  accepts  woman  with- 
out vexation  of  spirit  as  an  ordinary  incident  of  life. 
When  we  have  dispossessed  our  minds  of  the  idea  that 
her  poems  mirror  the  soul  of  the  East,  we  can  see  that  she 
owes  a  heavy  debt  to  Swinburne  and  to  younger  English 
poets  who  were  influenced  by  the  French  Romantics  and 
Symbolists. 

Youth  and  passionate  love — these  are  the  breath  and 
the  spirit  of  her  poetry.  Yet  she  was  in  her  thirty-seventh 
year  and  drawing  toward  middle  age  before  she  published 
her  first  volume,  The  Garden  of  Kama  (1902).  In  her  life- 
time only  one  more  volume,  Stars  of  the  Desert  (1903), 
appeared.  Indian  Love  (1905)  was  published  posthumously. 
The  small  collection  of  stray  Poems  (1907),  inspired  by 
other  lands  than  India,  is  so  inferior  to  her  other  work 
that  it  barely  calls  for  mention. 

Sensuous,  impassioned,  dreamy,  melancholy,  voluptu- 
ously wistful,  these  are  terms  of  description  which  come 
to  the  pen  when  we  turn  over  her  volumes.  Passionate 
intensity  of  hope,  regret  and  love  was  given  to  Laurence 
Hope,  and  the  fragments  of  Sappho  recur  to  mind  as  we 
read  her  verse.  A  voluptuous  abandon  is  not,  however, 
the  whole  meaning  of  her  thought  and  poetry.  A  deep 


144  POETRY  [PART  i 

melancholy  and  eager  pessimism  underlie  all  her  work. 
She  can  write — 

"  I  am  so  weary  of  the  Curse  of  Living 

The  endless,  aimless  torture,  tumult,  fears. 
Surely,  if  life  were  any  God's  free  giving 

He,  seeing  His  gift,  long  since  went  blind  with  tears." 

And  this  is  no  affectation  or  pose,  but  a  cry  wrung  from 
the  heart.  A  poem  like  '  Rutland  Gate  '  is  evidence  of 
her  humanitarian  sympathy  and  her  power  to  feel  pity 
for  those  crushed  out  in  the  battle  of  life.  And  beyond 
the  dreams  of  impassioned  love,  in  moments  of  quiet  she 
realised  that 

"...  the  joy  of  life  is  hid 
In  simple  and  tender  things." 

Nor  need  we  look  in  vain,  in  the  volumes  of  Laurence  Hope, 
for  poetry  in  the  greater  manner,  a  poetry  of  language 
laden  with  beauty  and  meaning  combined. 

"  And  this  is  our  Wisdom  :  we  rest  together, 
On  the  great  lone  hills  in  the  storm-filled  weather, 
And  watch  the  skies  as  they  pale  and  burn, 
The  golden  stars  in  their  orbits  turn, 
While  Love  is  with  us,  and  Time  and  Peace, 
And  life  has  nothing  to  give  but  these." 

Writing  like  this  has  the  power  and  spell  of  deep  and 
sincere  emotion.  The  '  Famine  Song  '  and  '  O,  Life,  I 
have  taken  you  for  my  Lover  '  carry  with  them  the 
sudden  excitation  of  great  and  noble  poetry.  Though  her 
writing  is,  in  the  general  mind,  associated  with  another 
kind  of  poetry,  her  temper  is  often  melancholy,  grave, 
severe.  Undeniably,  there  was  also  another  side  of  life 
she  knew — physical  love ;  and,  quite  mistakenly,  for 
many  this  is  the  only  significance  of  Laurence  Hope.  Old 
age  she  understood,  middle  age  with  its  important  selfish- 
ness she  dreaded,  but  youth  and  its  passionate  joy  in 
loving  were  the  chief  themes  of  her  song.  For  youth  is 
the  fullness  of  life  and  cries  : 

"  Do  as  thou  wilt  with  mine  and  me, 

Beloved,  I  only  pray. 
Follow  the  promptings  of  thy  youth, 
Let  there  be  no  delay  !  " 


CHAP,  iv]  THE  POETESSES  145 

Yet,  with  all  her  insistence  on  a  single  aspect  of  life,  she 
rarely  sinks,  like  many  erotic  poets,  into  meaningless 
ecstasy.  A  poem  like  the  '  Song  of  Gulbaz  '  occurs  to 
the  mind  as  merely  sensuously  pretty  and  ineffective,  but 
its  very  flatness  stamps  it,  even  for  the  hurried  reader, 
as  a  surprising  anomaly  among  her  poems. 

In  general  Laurence  Hope's  word-music  is  spirited  and 
accurate  without  exhibiting  the  finer  graces  and  beauties 
of  a  more  accomplished  metrist.  She  does  not  often  lapse 
into  ugly  lines  like — 

"  Solace  I  my  despairing  soul  with  this." 

Nor  is  she  often  guilty  of  unnecessary  slips  like  the  split 
infinitive  of 

"  But  now,  God  knows,  what  use  to  still  be  tender/' 
or  the  colloquial  slanginess  of 

"  Yet,  when  we  restedj  night-times,  on  the  sand." 

As  a  rule  her  English  is  simple  and  good. 

If  the  higher  enthusiasm  of  Laurence  Hope's  nature  had 
burned  more  constantly  and  clearly  she  would  oftener 
have  written  in  the  stronger  and  more  impersonal  manner 
of  her  greater  poems  ;  but,  though  intellectual  power 
and  the  love  of  fine  thinking  were  with  her,  a  passionate 
lyric  emotion  took  her  life  in  hand.  Yet,  despite  the 
enervating  character  of  much  that  she  has  written,  she 
has  left  many  pages  of  fine  and  moving  poetry.  The 
most  characteristic  and  personal  of  her  poems  are  con- 
tained in  the  first  and  third  of  her  volumes.  Stars  of  the 
Desert,  save  for  a  few  pages,  is  hardly  so  good  a  book 
as  the  other  two. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  greater  contrast  than 

that  afforded  by  an  apposition  of  The  Garden  of  Kama  and 

Underneath  the  Bough.     Restraint   and 

Michael  Field.         chiselled  beauty  of  form  mark  the  poems 

of  Miss  Bradley  and  Miss  Cooper,  who 

wrote    under    the    pseudonym,    Michael 

Field.1     A  large  part  of  their  writing  is  literary  drama  in 

verse.    Several  of  the  plays  deal  with  English  and  Scotch 

history.    The  Father's  Tragedy  (1885)  is  founded  upon  the 

1  Miss  Cooper  died  1913  ;  Miss  Bradley  1914. 


146  POETRY  [PART  i 

story  of  David,  Earl  of  Rothesay,  The  Tragic  Mary  (1890) 
upon  the  life  of  Mary,  Queen  of  Scots  :  and  Fair  Rosamund 
(1884),  William  Rufus  (1886)  and  Canute  the  Great  (1887) 
are  other  historical  plays  written  in  imitation  of  the 
Elizabethans.  Callirrhoe  (1884)  and  Brutus  Ultor  (1887) 
have  classical  themes,  but  are  scarcely  classical  in  feeling. 
None  of  these  is  arresting  :  they  hardly  rise  above  the 
interest  of  all  fine  literary  experiment.  The  supremely 
beautiful  lyrical  genius  of  Michael  Field  is  best  seen  in 
shorter  poems,  and  first  in  the  consummate  success  of 
Long  Ago  (1889),  which  attempts  the  hazardous  task  of 
extending  the  fragments  of  Sappho.  These  are  each  poems 
of  crystalline  clearness,  of  exquisite  beauty  in  form  and 
music.  Not  less  perfect  are  the  nature  poems  and  love- 
lyrics,  nearly  all  of  them  very  short,  of  Underneath  the 
Bough  (1893).  These  are  songs  as  ethereal  in  sound  as 
the  iridescent  colours  of  sunlight  falling  upon  the  glitter- 
ing spray  of  the  cascade,  like  snatches  of  melody  heard 
faintly  in  the  distance.  Slight  in  content  as  they  are, 
in  crystalline  purity  scarcely  any  writing  of  the  last  three 
decades  will  compare  with  these  poems.  The  influence 
of  Herri  ck  and  the  Caroline  poets  is  hardly  to  be  over- 
looked, but  the  element  of  imitativeness  does  not  detract 
from  the  beauty  of  the  whole. 

The  poems  of  Sight  and  Song  (1892),  an  attempt  in  an 
exceedingly  artificial  mode,  betray  the  effort  of  trying  to 
say  something  where  nothing  useful  is  to  be  said;  and 
these  lyrics,  which  seek  to  translate  into  words  the  line 
and  colour  of  some  of  the  world's  great  pictures,  are  often 
laboured,  although  several,  like  '  The  Birth  of  Venus,' 
in  which  the  picture  is  of  little  account  save  as  a  suggestion, 
are  among  the  most  beautiful  of  Michael  Field's  poems. 
These  three  early  volumes,  printed  in  limited  editions, 
contain  more  that  is  supremely  beautiful  than  any  other 
of  Michael  Field's  books.  Wild  Honey  (1908)  loses  some- 
thing of  the  ethereal  and  indefinable  grace  of  the  early 
lyrics,  and  Poems  of  Adoration  (1912)  suffers  from  the 
unavoidable  limitations  of  all  religious  verse.  The 
theme  is  written  up  to  and  upon  ;  it  does  not  spring 
unsought. 

There  is  little  contact  with  the  actualities  of  everyday 
life  in  Michael  Field's  lyrics  and  shorter  poems.  Art, 


CHAP,  iv]  THE  POETESSES  147 

literature,  nature  and  love  seen  through  the  haze  of 
literary  culture,  these  are  the  writers'  sources  of  inspira- 
tion. But  the  gem-like  finish  and  perfection,  the  harmony 
of  style  and  thought,  the  simple  directness  of  these  poems 
lends  them  a  unique  beauty.  And,  if  the  stress  of  life  is 
not  felt,  these  brief  lyrics  are  far  from  empty  of  matter ; 
if  they  do  not  bear  the  impress  of  thought  and  great 
emotion,  they  generally  express  something  that  was 
worthy  the  singing,  and  always  the  expression  is  finely 
and  delicately  wrought.  No  analogy  so  readily  springs 
to  the  mind  in  describing  these  poems  as  the  image  of  the 
clear  crystal  with  sunlight  falling  upon  it.  Michael  Field 
marks  no  tendency.  These  volumes  inherit  from  the 
Elizabethan  and  Caroline  poets,  they  are  shaped  by  a  life 
of  seclusion  and  culture  and  by  the  love  of  all  that  is 
best  in  the  world's  art.  There  is  here  no  great  writing  ; 
but  within  their  own  limits  Michael  Field's  lyrics  almost 
reach  perfection. 

Laurence  Hope  was  a  poetess  of  her  age  and  time, 
betraying  its  influences,  reflecting  its  motives,  while  time 

and  place  have  left  few  marks  on  the 
Mary  E.  Coleridge,  poetry  of  Michael  Field,  whose  art  is 
1861-1907.  produced  in  a  haven  of  seclusion  from 

the  battle  of  contemporary  life.  Mary 
E.  Coleridge  is  more  sensitive  to  the  pain  of  living, 
but  as  it  is  felt  in  solitude,  not  in  the  stress  of  the 
larger  world.  She  reflects  in  no  distinctive  way  any 
tendencies  of  her  time.  Her  life  was  quiet,  she  was  not 
unfriendly,  but  she  did  not  easily  communicate  herself 
in  the  chance  of  social  intercourse.  Her  historical 
romances,  prose  fantasies  and  poems  were  as  unlikely  to 
win  recognition  from  the  average  reviewer  as  the  general 
public,  and  she  remained  but  little  known  save  to  a  small 
group,  though  Stevenson  praised  The  Seven  Sleepers  of 
Ephesus  (1893),  the  first  of  her  prose  fantasies,  and  Mr. 
Robert  Bridges  encouraged  her  in  the  publication  of  her 
verse.  In  her  lifetime  she  printed  two  small  books  of 
poetry,  Fancy's  Following  (1896)  and  Fancy's  Guerdon 
(1897),  but  it  is  the  slight  collection  of  two  hundred  and 
thirty-seven  short  poems,  published  after  her  death,  which 
represents  Mary  Coleridge  as  a  poetess.  She  led  a  shy 
and  lonely  life,  treasuring  her  days  in  imagination  and 


148  POETRY  [PART  i 

memory,  conscious  of  her  own  failure  to  take  a  part  in 
the  larger  activities  and  enthusiasms.  Her  nature  was 
reserved  :  she  stayed  her  soul  on  a  melancholy  wistful- 
ness  in  default  of  strong  convictions.  Her  verse  is  the 
outcome  not  of  enduring  emotion,  but  the  eager  hopes 
and  quiet  regrets  of  a  moment ;  and  for  her  the  world  of 
dreams  was  more  than  everyday  reality.  In  incident 
her  life  was  poor  :  in  mood  and  sensation  it  was  rich. 
But  her  poetry,  beautiful  though  it  is,  is  unnerving  ;  it  is 
a  pessimism  of  regret  for  the  things  unuttered,  a  doubt 
whether  the  ideals  can  be  true,  unredeemed  by  any  stoic 
courage  or  wide  humanitarian  sympathy.  She  questions 
the  universe,  and  never  in  the  hope  of  an  answer.  Mary 
Coleridge  scarcely  belonged  to  her  generation.  She  was 
the  descendant  of  Clough  and  Arnold,  troubled  with 
weakening  apprehensions  and  religious  difficulties,  but 
she  was  unsupported  by  the  ethical  strength  of  the  Rugby 
poets.  She  had  no  enthusiasm  with  the  writers  of  a 
younger  generation  to  play  heartily  the  game  of  life  for 
the  season  in  which  it  is  given.  To  read  the  collected 
Poems  (1907)  is  to  suspect  we  have  chanced  upon  a 
document  which  has  strayed  inadvertently  out  of  the 
'sixties. 

The    poetry    of   Mrs.    Rosamund    Marriott    Watson    is 

optimistic  in  temper,  and  for  this,  perhaps,  as  for  other 

reasons  she  has  the  pen  of  a  more 

Rosamund  Marriott  ready  writer  than  Mary  Coleridge  and 
Watson,  1863-1911.  less  distinction  of  manner.  Never- 
theless, her  verse-writing  takes  its 
place  but  little  below  the  best  in  recent  years.  She  wrote 
nothing  that  was  careless,  nothing  that  was  not  the  reflex 
of  a  mind  fastidious  in  the  choice  of  words  and  imbued 
with  a  love  of  fine  literature.  And  not  only  is  her  work- 
manship good,  her  sense  of  literary  responsibility  unfail- 
ing— she  possessed  in  addition  a  genuine  lyrical  gift.  But 
to  read  her  collected  Poems  (1912)  is  to  make  us  wish  for 
a  poet  a  little  more  unequal :  as  there  are  few  deep  sub- 
sidences in  her  writing  so  there  are  few  hills.  A  Summer 
Night  (1891)  gave  evidence  of  matured  power  and  a  gift 
of  handling  wrords,  which  placed  it  above  A  Bird-bride 
(1889)';  but  in  the  next  two  volumes,  Vespertilia  (1895) 
and  After  Sunset  (1904)  there  is  nothing  of  an  outstanding 


CHAP,  iv]  THE  POETESSES  149 

character,  and  her  latest  poems,  The  Lamp  and  the  Lute 
(1912)  repeated,  not  quite  so  well,  themes,  thoughts  and 
moods  which  already  had  appeared  sufficiently  often. 
She  is  always  admirably  simple  and  lucid,  exact  in  her 
use  of  words,  and  her  metres  are  written  almost  impec- 
cably ;  but  her  thoughts  are  few  and  she  rings  the  changes 
upon  them  too  often  in  a  long  series  of  short  poems,  for 
her  output  was  creditable  in  quantity.  The  joy  of  earth, 
of  town,  of  friendship,  the  wind  on  the  downs,  the  eager 
air  of  the  sea,  clouds  in  the  sky,  the  song  of  birds — in  a 
continuous  refrain  these  thoughts  and  images  are  reiter- 
ated. Her  range  is,  therefore,  limited  ;  she  is  not  often 
weak  nor  often  impassioned.  Rarely  does  a  strong  impulse 
carry  Mrs.  Watson  beyond  herself  and  inform  her  poetry 
with  a  high  emotion.  The  fine  poem,  '  Resurgam,'  is  an 
exception  to  this  generalisation.  But  it  is  in  poems  of 
nature  that  the  talent  of  Mrs.  Marriott  Watson  is  seen 
at  its  best ;  she  does  not  yield  to  weak  ecstasies  and  she 
is  never  coldly  self-conscious  like  Mary  Coleridge.  Her 
melancholy,  and  it  appears  not  infrequently,  is  not,  as 
with  so  many  poets  of  the  day,  an  irrational  anger  with 
the  universal  order,  for  she  was  glad  to  live  and  not 
ashamed  to  confess  it.  And  a  high  merit  she  possessed 
was  an  ear  for  the  fit  conjunction  of  sound  and  sense. 
An  example,  perhaps  the  best  example,  may  be  given 
from  one  of  her  earliest  poems,  the  '  Scythe  Song,'  with 
its  refrain  so  magically  suggestive  of  the  rustle  and  swish 
of  the  gleaming  blade  through  the  damp  meadow  grasses— 

"  Hush  !  the  Scythe  says,  where,  ah  where  ?  " 

Lady  Margaret  Sackville  is  always  simple,  always  lucid  : 
she  shows  the  love  of  fine  form,  of  beauty  intellectually 

conceived,  which  is  commonly  asso- 
Lady  Margaret  ciated  with  the  classical  temper  in 

Sackville,  b.  1882.  literature.  In  her  choice  of  classical 

subjects  for  her  dramatic  poems  she 
falls  into  a  group  with  Mr.  Hewlett,  Mr.  Binyon  and  Mr. 
Sturge  Moore,  and  in  power  of  dramatic  characterisation 
she  is  more  than  their  equal.  The  tragedy  of  Hildris  the 
Queen  (1908)  is  written  in  skilfully  handled,  nervous  and 
energetic  blank  verse  ;  and  Bertrud  and  Other  Dramatic 


150  'POETRY  [PART  i 

Poems  (1911)  contains  three  dramatic  pieces,  '  The  Wooing 
of  Dionysus,'  '  Tereus  '  and  '  Bertrud,'  of  rare  distinction. 
These  are  dramatic  poems  written  to  be  read  and  not 
acted,  but  they  are  dramatically  conceived  and  the 
characters  realistically  denned.  The  story  of  Bertrud,  the 
Queen,  defamed  to  her  husband  by  Gerta,  and  how  she 
yielded  place  to  save  the  tortured^soul  of  her  unworthy  rival, 
is  told  with  admirably  restrained  force  and  pathos.  The 
thoughts  of  the  poem  are  beautifully  and  nobly  expressed. 
Nor  is  there  in  the  poetry  of  Lady  Margaret  Sackville 
any  suspicion  of  careless  facility,  the  almost  universal 
failing  of  feminine  verse-writing.  She  always  leaves  an 
impression  of  a  reserve  in  strength,  and  exercises  a  praise- 
worthy economy  in  the  use  of  words.  But  it  may  be 
questioned  whether  she  would  not  do  well  to  write  poetry 
more  purely  lyrical,  despite  the  success  of  her  dramatic 
poems.  The  lyrics  contained  in  '  The  Wooing  of  Dionysus  ' 
are  better  than  the  poetic  narrative  ;  and  in  Poems  (1901), 
A  Hymn  to  Dionysus  and  Other  Poems  (1905)  and  Songs 
of  Aphrodite  (1913)  there  are  beautiful  lyrics  which  excite 
a  regret  that  we  have  so  few  from  the  same  hand.  '  The 
Helots  '  is  a  singularly  fine  and  spirited  poem  ;  '  The  Death 
of  Beatrice  '  is  beautifully  conceived  and  imaginatively 
expressed  ;  and  among  outstanding  poems  of  the  1905 
volume  are  '  Sunset,'  '  The  Celts '  and  '  The  Queen's 
Cabinet.'  The  octosyllables  of  the  last-named  poem 
recall  Keats' s  '  Eve  of  St.  Mark.'  The  atmosphere  of  vague 
and  drowsy  mystery,  the  description  of  the  room  rich 
with  costly  furniture  and  hangings,  of  the  air  laden  with 
heavy  perfume  and  haunted  by  a  hovering  fear — all  this 
is  suggestive  of  Keats,  but  not  as  a  tame  imitation ;  for 
'  The  Queen's  Cabinet,'  in  sheer  beauty  of  imagery  and 
music,  is  the  most  consummate  piece  of  poetry  Lady 
Margaret  Sackville  has  written.  A  poem  like  this  is  worth 
several  of  her  dramas.  Dramatic  poetry  not  for  the  stage 
is  always  something  of  an  anomaly  ;  whatever  elements  of 
pure  poetry  it  holds  are  hampered  and  at  a  disadvantage. 
But  Lady  Margaret  Sackville  notably  combines  lyric  faculty 
with  the  dramatic  instinct.  And  she  always  writes  with  a 
fine  sense  of  the  fitting,  avoiding  attempts  to  surprise  by 
wealth  of  imagery,  passion  of  metaphor  or  the  laboured 
and  far-sought  pictorial  phrase.  Her  style  is  invariably 


CHAP,  iv]  THE  POETESSES  151 

reserved  and  simple,  yet  it  rarely  becomes  flat  or  unemo- 
tional. 

Lady  Margaret  Sackville  writes  in  a  style  and  manner 
individual  and  self-formed ;  whenever  she  recalls  greater 
poetry  it  is  because  she  has  made  its  spirit  her  own,  not 

because  she  echoes  with  variations  the 
Ethel  Clifford.  music  of  phrases  and  lines  she  has 

learned.  But  the  poetry  of  Ethel 
Clifford  (Lady  Dilke)  is  an  example  at  its  best  of  much 
feminine  and  derivative  verse-writing.  In  Songs  of  Dreams 
(1903)  and  Love's  Journey  (1905)  she  invests  her  world 
with  an  atmosphere  of  sentiment  which  is  never  mawkish, 
her  rhythms  are  the  outcome  of  a  good  literary  conscious- 
ness, and  she  displays  a  gift  of  gentle  and  pleasing  song. 
If  her  melodies  have  little  individual  charm,  her  art  no 
high  felicity,  a  quiet  grace  distinguishes  her  verse.  Her 
themes  are  the  common  things  of  sight  and  sound  :  she 
sings  of  them  not  as  clearly  or  strongly  as  Mrs.  Marriott 
Watson,  but  she  is,  perhaps,  less  monotonous  in  her 
repetitions  than  several  of  the  Irish  poetesses.  Grass, 
leaves,  clouds,  rain,  the  song  of  birds  and  the  murmuring 
of  the  stream — from  these  she  rarely  wanders  to  strike  a 
bolder  note  as  in  '  The  Song  of  the  Heathen.'  A  gentle 
air  of  melancholy  sentiment  and  a  sympathy,  with  the 
literary  expression  of  thoughts — these  are  the  marks  of  her 
writing. 


PART   II 

IRISH   POETS   AND   PLAYWRIGHTS 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    CELTIC    REVIVAL 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD  urged  that  for  literary  purposes 
Europe  must  be  regarded  as  a  great  confederation  ;  and 
in  so  doing  he  was  impelled  by  the  beliefs  that  English 
criticism  and  letters  suffered  from  insularity  and  that 
the  strong  influence  of  Carlyle's  Teutonism  had  not  been 
without  its  ill  consequences.  With  Carlyle  he  could 
recognise  the  genius  of  Goethe  and  admit  the  supremacy 
of  Faust  above  all  modern  poetry,  but  he  held  that  English 
letters  had  sufficiently  yielded  to  the  influence  of  German 
romanticism.  To  counteract  insularity  and  vague  roman- 
ticism he  exhorted  his  countrymen  to  admire  the  sanity 
and  logic  of  the  French  people.  Arnold's  desire  was  more 
than  merely  to  oppose  Gallic  lucidity  to  Teutonic  romance 
and  incoherence,  his  ideal  was  such  a  literature  as  irre- 
spective of  climatic  and  racial  accidents  should  express 
the  best  that  has  been  thought  and  with  a  universal 
meaning.  A  spirit  of  reaction  against  the  romantic 
tendency  of  his  time  led  him  to  ask  what  was  neither 
possible  nor  good.  His  ideal  was  nearly  realised  in  the 
eighteenth  century,"  an  age  in  which  the  ^consciousness 
of  nationality  was:  weak.  Nations  were  ^conceived  as 
centralisations  of  arbitrary  authority,  not  as  men  united 
by  common  ties  of  life,  tradition,  custom  and  faith  ;  and 
literature  did  not*escape  the  effect  of  this  economic  theory. 
It  adopted  the  institutional  view  of  its  functions  as 
definitely  as  this  principle  governed  economic  concepts. 
Classicism,  which  was  primarily  Latinism,  was  arbiter 
and  ruler,  and  writers  sought  to  model  themselves  by 
the  canons  of  classic  taste,  not  to  utter  what  lay  in  and 
about  them.  Boileau  reigned  in  France,  Pope  in  England, 
and  Germany  to  the  middle  of  the  century  was  content 
to  serve  in  obedience  to  the  classic  convention.  As  the 
nation  was  regarded  as  a  collection  of  men  held  together 

155 


156      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

by  a  legislation  externally  imposed,  so  literature  was 
accepted  as  an  institution  founded  upon  well-defined 
principles,  subservient  to  rules  devised  of  old.  This  con- 
cept reflected  both  less  and  more  than  incapacity  for 
originality.  The  eighteenth  century  was,  at  the  least, 
emphatically  a  century  of  high  distinction  in  intellectual 
power ;  but  it  went  astray  in  adopting  a  false  theory  of 
life,  a  false  theory  which  lay  in  part  at  the  root  of  Arnold's 
protest  against  the  romanticism  of  his  period.  The 
inspiration  of  writers  in  different  countries  was  drawn 
from  sources  non-national,  in  the  belief,  whether  con- 
sciously conceived  and  stated  or  not,  that  thus  poetry 
and  the  arts  were  imbued  with  a  universality  whereby 
they  overcame  the  limitations  of  diverse  language  and 
national  exclusiveness.  But  the  literary  and  artistic 
standard  which  knows  no  confines  of  climate  or  race,  yet 
has  an  individual  life  of  its  own,  has  not  hitherto  been, 
and  probably  never  will  be  ;  for,  despite  the  wide  and 
rapid  diffusion  of  common  knowledge  in  our  day  and  an 
immense  acceleration  in  means  of  communication,  nation- 
ality, provincialism  and  locality  are  continuously  more 
emphasised  in  literature.  And  a  most  cursory  survey 
of  the  past  is  sufficient  to  dispel  the  illusion  that  literature 
derives  a  more  enduring  life  in  so  far  as  it  dissociates 
itself  from  the  accidents  of  time  and  place.  The  idioms 
and  modes  of  thought  of  the  Greek  dramatists  are  bound 
up  with  the  traditions  of  a  small  city-state ;  Shake- 
speare is  summed  as  ''  not  of  an  age  but  for  all  time," 
and  this  despite  the  fact  that  he  was  an  Elizabethan 
Englishman,  more  subject  to  the  limitations  of  his  age 
than  a  Bacon  or  a  Raleigh.  And  what  is  true  of  these 
is  true  no  less  of  all  great  writers  and  their  work.  Nation- 
ality, local  idiosyncrasy  and  the  accidents  of  time,  scarcely 
less  than  the  power  of  genius  to  rise  above  the  limitations 
of  time  and  place,  contribute  to  that  inner  truth  and 
reality  without  which  the  arts,  though  they  may  please, 
die  with  their  begetters.  For  style  is  not  merely  the  man, 
in  Buff  on' s  phrase,  it  is  the  man  conditioned  by  and 
relative  to  the  accidents  of  his  birth  and  environment. 
The  prose  of  Plato  and  Hooker  is,  perhaps,  not  the  only 
but  certainly  the  chief  cause  contributory  to  their  immor- 
tality ;  and  this  prose  is  the  thought  of  the  individual 


CHAP,  i]  THE  CELTIC  REVIVAL  157 

expressing  itself  in  the  best  and  noblest  form  of  speech 
garnered  from  the  common  language  of  the  day.  The 
mingled  quaintness  and  splendour  of  North,  Hooker  and 
Browne  had  no  great  ring  of  fine  unfamiliarity  to  the  first 
readers.  The  truth  of  Buffon's  aphorism  lies  in  this — 
that  style,  both  true  and  strong,  can  never  flow  from 
sources  merely  literary,  for  it  is  a  river  of  life.  If 
the  ideal  of  Arnold  and  others  be  a  good  rule  for  the 
critic  to  bear  in  mind,  it  tends  to  confusion  when  it  leads 
to  depreciation  of  a  poetry  and  prose  that  derives  from 
the  strips  and  margins  of  experience,  unconscious  of  the 
greater  whole. 

In  modern  creative  literature  the  tendency,  doubtless, 
has  been  to  emphasise  the  distinctions  of  nationality. 
Arnold  himself,  with  the  publication  of  On  the  Study  of 
Celtic  Literature  (1867),  contributed  to  the  interest  of  study 
into  racial  characteristics  ;  and  he  has  been  followed  by 
some  wise  and  many  foolish  writers  who  treat  of  the 
Celtic  spirit.  Inevitably  the  Celt,  whether  of  Brittany, 
Scotland  or  Ireland,  learned  to  play  the  role  expected  of 
him  in  various  guises  of  melancholy  and  mysticism.  But 
the  Celt  has  not  been  alone  in  asserting  his  nationality. 
England,  Russia,  Germany,  France,  Italy,  the  United 
States  have  all  found  expositors  of  the  national  spirit, 
either  conceived  in  the  whole  or  mirrored  in  small  pro- 
vinces, counties  and  towns.  Provincialism  has  become 
the  prevailing  note  in  French  fiction,  hardly  less  so  in 
Germany,  every  county  in  England  has  its  chronicler, 
and  our  colonies  have  given  birth  to  their  own  writers. 
And  this  decentralisation  of  literature  may  be  regarded 
as  one  aspect  of  the  widespread  agitation  for  decentral- 
isation of  government,  which  is  but  a  natural  reaction 
against  the  extension  of  world-empires  with  wide,  involved 
and  complicated  interests.  But  the  literature  of  the  Celtic 
races  is  not,  as  is  the  new  literature  of  our  colonies  or 
America,  the  expression  of  a  full  and  overflowing  life, 
it  is  the  refuge  of  a  little  people  driven  into  the  corners 
of  the  earth  and  prevented  only  by  the  western  sea 
from  flying  further.  The  Celt  from  his  islands,  his 
margins  of  strand  and  his  fastnesses  in  the  barren  hills 
has  flung  back,  in  these  latter  years,  upon  the  onset  of 
a  material  civilisation  a  spiritual,  religious  and  mystical 


158 

poetry,  prose  and  drama,  as  in  the  old  unhappy  days  he 
flung  himself  in  vain  upon  the  oncoming  Saxon,  Dane 
and  Norman. 

As  a  direct  expression  of  "  provincialism "  among 
writers  in  English  no  tendency  within  recent  years  has 
been  of  greater  interest  than  the  Celtic  Renascence.  It 
is  not  wholly  new.  No  single  modern  book,  embodying 
the  Celtic  spirit  in  the  manifestations  by  custom  associated 
with  it,  melancholy  and  mysticism,  has  had  a  tithe  of 
the  influence  exercised  by  Macpherson's  Ossian  (1760-63), 
which,  if  it  met  with  some  contempt  in  England,  produced 
effects  almost  magical  in  France  and  Germany.  The 
Arthurian  Cycle  of  Celtic  tales  found  an  enduring  form 
in  English  much  earlier  than  this  in  Malory's  Morte 
d' Arthur  (1485),  although  in  this  splendid  adaptation  the 
tales  have  lost  much  of  their  authentic  character  ;  and 
Malory  is  not  to  be  counted  with  the  manifestations  of 
the  Celtic  spirit  as  we  count  Macpherson  or  Lady  Charlotte 
Guest,  whose  translation  of  the  Mabinogion  (1838-49)  did 
in  a  lesser  degree  for  Wales  what  Macpherson  had  achieved 
triumphantly  for  the  highlands  of  Scotland.  But  the 
Celtic  Revival  of  recent  years  within  the  British  Isles 
has  been  almost  entirely  Irish.  William  Sharp  is  the 
most  striking  example  of  the  Celtic  spirit  in  Scotland, 
for  George  Macdonald  and  Mr.  Neil  Munro  are  but  partially 
Celtic  and  some  of  their  best  writing  belongs  to  other 
spheres  of  work.  T.  E.  Brown,  likewise,  is  not  chiefly 
of  interest  as  a  manifestation  of  the  Celticism  of  the  Isle 
of  Man.  The  Celtic  elements  of  Scotland  and  Wales 
have  only  received  incidental  and  passing  reflection  in 
modern  literature,  but  Ireland  has  produced  some  of  the 
noblest,  the  most  sincere  and  the  most  beautiful  poetry, 
and  the  most  imaginatively  truthful  drama  recently 
written  in  English.  The  poems  of  A.  E.  and  the  early 
poems  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  have  an  individuality  beyond 
that  of  all  but  two  or  three  contemporary  poets  writing 
in  England ;  and  no  other  writer  in  our  language  can 
compare  to-day,  in  drama  that  is  at  once  poetry  and  the 
highest  truth,  with  the  author  of  The  Well  of  the  Saints. 

Nevertheless,  the  inspiration  of  the  Irish  poets  is  at 
least  as  much  climatic  and  local  as  racial.  A  flood  of 
unthinking  and  nonsensical  writing  has  been  poured  over 


CHAP.  i|  THE  CELTIC  REVIVAL  159 

the  Celtic  Revival ;  and  the  poor  Saxon,  who  is  supposed 
to  be  without  those  divine  gifts  of  idealism  and  mystic 
vision  granted  to  the  race  he  has  driven  before  him,  has 
been  patronisingly  belittled.  It  is  no  depreciation  of  the 
work  done  by  Irish  writers  in  our  day  to  say  that  even 
in  those  faculties  more  peculiarly  arrogated  to  the  Celt 
he  has  never  approached  the  depth  and  breadth  of  the 
Teuton,  and  that  the  whole  literary  output  of  the  Celtic 
races,  so-called,  sinks  into  insignificance  in  comparison 
with  the  work  of  the  Teuton.  Goethe  was  greatly  moved 
by  Ossian,  but  no  Celt  has  yet  written  a  Faust  ;  and  it  is 
a  question  to  be  asked  why  the  Ossianic  poems  should 
have  found  their  warmest  admirers  with  a  Teutonic  people. 
Again  Shelley  was  an  Anglo-Saxon,  Blake  a  mere  Londoner, 
yet  they  surely,  by  all  the  signs  of  their  calling,  should 
be  of  the  Celtic  race  ?  If  it  be  a  matter  of  weighing  the 
vision  of  beauty  and  the  power  of  mystic  idealism  vouch- 
safed to  the  Celt  against  the  measure  of  these  gifts  as  they 
have  been  bestowed  on  the  Teuton  or  the  Latin  no  impartial 
judgment  could  find  a  moment  of  hesitation.  The  faculties 
supposititiously  the  inheritance  of  the  Celt  are  not  intrin- 
sically his  ;  and  in  powers  of  thought  he  falls  behind 
most  peoples.  Celtic  myth  and  literature  come  from 
the  outskirts  of  the  larger  life  of  Europe  ;  and  it  is  to 
this  seclusion  from  the  bustle  and  pressure  of  a  com- 
mercial civilisation  we  may  attribute  the  brooding  dreami- 
ness of  Celtic  legend  and  poetry.  And  in  so  far  as  we 
speak  of  Irish  writers  to-day  it  may  be  questioned  whether 
they  are,  individually  or  collectively,  of  another  race  to 
writers  on  the  other  side  of  the  Irish  Sea.  We  are  of 
mixed  blood  in  these  islands,  and  not  least  so  in  Ireland ; 
and  the  accident  of  birth  rather  than  the  inheritance  of 
tendencies  transmitted  through  generations  explains  what- 
ever is  peculiar  to  the  work  of  modern  Irish  dramatists 
and  poets. 

The  Irish  novel  scarcely  enters  for  contrast,  for  it  has 
never  in  any  essential  or  important  manner  differentiated 
itself  from  the  novel  written  in  England.  The  typical 
novels  of  Carleton,  Lover  and  Lever  represent  with 
abounding  burlesque  and  exaggeration  of  humour  the 
Irish  peasant  and  country  gentleman  in  the  earlier  half 
of  the  last  century.  It  was  the  work  of  the  last  two 


160       IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

especially  to  create  the  stage  Irishman  as  he  is  still 
pictured  by  the  average  Englishman  of  to-day,  despite 
the  exposure  of  Mr.  Shaw's  John  Bull's  Other  Island,  and 
the  introduction  of  a  new  convention  in  the  sorrowful 
and  poetic  Irishman  of  the  modern  drama  and  a  few 
novels.  Lever's  drawing  was  not  wholly  out  of  truth, 
for  Ireland  eighty  years  ago,  before  the  blight  of  the 
great  famine,  was  a  richer,  happier  and  more  careless 
country  than  it  is  to-day.  But,  like  other  lands,  Ireland 
reflects  the  light  at  many  angles,  and  the  convention  of 
Synge  and  his  imitators  is  probably  no  less  a  practice 
in  the  art  of  omission  than  the  rollicking,  devil-may-care 
manner  of  Lever. 

In  recent  years,  though  Miss  Barlow,  Katharine  Tynan, 
Canon  Sheehan,  George  A.  Birmingham  and  Mr.  James 
Stephens  be  not  forgotten,  Ireland  has  done  no  work 
of  importance,  though  much  that  is  charming  and 
pleasurable,  in  prose  fiction.  In  poetry  and  drama  it  is 
another  story.  The  drama  of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre 
is  notable  and  significant,  not  only  in  its  beauty,  its  poetry 
and  its  truthfulness,  but  as  an  example  of  reaction  against 
the  European  vogue  of  bald  realism  in  stagecraft,  which 
was  the  outward  sign  of  Ibsen's  triumph  after  a  long 
uphill  fight  for  recognition.  Unfortunately  this  indepen- 
dence in  style  and  method,  which  was  grateful  in  an  age 
when  Germany,  France  and  England  had  leagued  to 
pursue  "  realism  "  as  the  only  approved  method  of  play 
writing,  has  not  been  sustained  ;  for  in  the  work  of  Mr. 
Lennox  Robinson,  Mr.  St.  John  Ervine  and  other  younger 
members  of  the  school  a  tendency  to  fall  back  under  the 
influence  of  Ibsen,  Hauptmann  and  Mr.  Galsworthy  is 
only  too  apparent.  All  that  was  best  in  the  nationalism 
of  Synge,  Lady  Gregory  and  Mr.  Rutherford  Mayne  is 
being  lost,  and  nothing  is  substituted  save  the  practice 
of  a  dramatic  method  which  by  others  has  been  handled 
with  greater  skill  and  power.  Irish  literary  drama,  as 
expressive  of  the  peculiarities  of  a  life  and  habit  removed 
from  the  greater  cycle  of  European  art,  has  probably 
seen  its  day,  but  not  before  it  has  produced  plays  of  great 
beauty  in  conception,  distinctive  originality  in  language 
and  method  of  character-drawing,  and  alive  with  a 
common  and  national  aspiration.  Synge  has  written 


CHAP,  i]  THE  CELTIC  REVIVAL  161 

masterpieces  of  dramatic  genius  which  can  only  die  with 
the  language  :  and  though  Mr.  Yeats'  faculty  is  lyric, 
not  dramatic,  and  the  work  of  Lady  Gregory,  Mr.  Edward 
Martyn,  Mr.  Rutherford  Mayne  and  the  other  Irish 
dramatists  falls  far  below  that  of  Synge,  there  is  in  their 
writings  a  freshness,  a  force  and  a  literary  power  which 
raises  their  plays  above  the  plane  of  drama  composed  only 
for  the  boards  and  without  meaning  in  printed  form. 

In  poetry  the  Irish  Renascence  does  not  present  features 
that  can  readily  be  co-ordinated.  Literature,  not  life,  is 
often  the  fountain  source,  and  there  is  frequently  little  of 
the  spirit  of  nationalism  in  the  poets  whom  we  may  gather 
in  loose  collocation  as  Irish.  At  no  time  has  Irish  poetry, 
as  a  whole,  been  distinctively  national,  and  the  epithet 
Celtic,  as  has  been  hinted,  is  a  misnomer  if  it  is  used  to 
appropriate  to  Irish  poets  brooding  melancholy,  wistful 
mysticism  and  fervent  idealism, — characteristics  which  in 
the  poetry  of  England,  Germany,  India  and  virtually  any 
land  appear  and  mingle  with  other  and  differing  ten- 
dencies. No  one  would  claim  that  Tom  Moore,  George 
Darley  and  Aubrey  de  Vere  peculiarly  and  essentially 
reflected  Ireland.  Mangan,  who  belonged  to  the  Young 
Ireland  party  and  adapted  Gaelic  lyrics  to  the  English, 
has  greater  claims  to  be  regarded  as  an  Irish  poet  on  the 
strength  of  My  Dark  Rosaleen  and  other  poems,  whether 
translations  or  originals  ;  but  he  is  at  least  as  fine  and 
inspired  a  poet  when  he  writes  of  subjects  that  are  not 
Irish.  Nothing,  as  Professor  Hugh  Walker  observes, 
"  surpasses,  if  indeed  anything  equals,  the  best  of  the 
Oriental  section,  The  Karamanian  Exile,  with  its  daring 
imagination,  its  fine  swinging  rhythm,  its  skilful  use  of 
the  proper  name  and  of  Mangan' s  favourite  device  of 
repetition."1  Nor  can  Arthur  O'Shaugnessy,  Oscar  Wilde 
and  Mr.  Herbert  Trench  be  accounted,  with  any  meaning, 
Irish  rather  than  English  ;  for  their  best  work  has  nothing 
to  do  with  Ireland  and  affords  no  example  of  hereditary 
transmission  of  characteristics.  If  other  poets,  living 
or  not  long  dead,  may  with  greater  show  of  reason  be 
collected  as  Irish,  this  demarcation  must  in  many  cases 
be  taken  to  imply  but  little.  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  though 
he  has  chosen  his  subjects  in  lyric  and  dramatic  verse 
1  The  Literature  of  the  Victorian  Era,  p.  H59. 


162       IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

from  Ireland's  store  of  older  myth  and  legend,  can  find 
elsewhere  an  equal  source  of  inspiration,  for  his  enthusiasm 
springs  from  literature  not  life ;  the  poetry  of  A.  E.,  though 
cast  against  a  background  of  Irish  landscape,  in  its  vision 
of  a  unity  of  sentient  life  in  man  and  the  universe  borrows 
from  the  thought  and  sacred  poetry  of  India  more  than 
from  any  influences  peculiarly  those  of  Ireland ;  Miss  Eva 
Gore-Booth  reflects  mystic  thought  from  Heraclitus  to 
Paracelsus  ;  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde  is  a  translator  ;  Lionel 
Johnson,  Norah  Hopper  and  Mr.  James  Stephens  are  only 
incidentally  Irish. 

Nevertheless,  if  the  poets  of  Irish  birth  be  grouped 
together  it  would  be  idle  to  deny  the  presence  in  their 
work,  taken  in  the  whole,  of  a  mysticism  and  wistfulness 
which  is  not  so  markedly  apparent  in  any  considerable 
group  of  more  purely  English  poets.  And  these  character- 
istics, if  not  wholly  racial,  at  least  borrow  from  climatic 
and  physical  environment,  they  are  one  manifestation  of 
a  group-soul ;  and,  thus  understood,  the  word  Celtic  may 
serve  to  describe  the  literature  and  mind  of  certain  peoples 
whose  lot  has  been  cast  in  the  western  margins  and 
mountainous  districts  of  France  and  these  islands. 


CHAPTER  [II 

IRISH    POETS 

W.  B.  Yeats — A.  E.— Douglas  Hyde — Lionel  Pigot  Johnson — J.  M. 
Synge — Padraic  Colum — James  Stephens — '  John  Eglinton  ' — Charles 
Weekes — J.  H.  Cousins — Thomas  Keohler — George  Sigerson — 'Seumas 
MacCathmhaoil ' — Seumas  O'Sullivan. 

FOR  many  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  is  the  "  indicating  number  " 
of  the  Celtic  Revival,  and  in  this  conception  of  him  they 

are  justified,  although  in  each  of  his 
William  Butler  activities  he  has,  perhaps,  been  sur- 
Yeats,  b.  1865.  passed  by  other  members  of  the  group 

to  which  he  belongs.  The  finest  mystical 
lyrics  of  A.  E.,  in  their  combination  of  utter  simplicity 
with  substantial  force,  have  not  been  rivalled  by  Mr. 
Yeats,  from  whose  manner  a  tinge  of  artifice  has  never 
wholly  been  absent ;  and  in  later  years  this  has  developed 
into  deliberate  and  calculated  symbolism.  Although  some 
of  his  greater  passages  of  poetry  are  to  be  found  in  the 
verse  dramas,  although  he  has  carefully  studied  and 
cultivated  play-writing,  his  dramatic  faculty  remains 
weak  ;  and  here  Irish  writers  of  less  note  are  easily  his 
superiors.  In  knowledge  of  the  older  literature,  legend 
and  language  of  Ireland  he  is  the  inferior  of  Dr.  Douglas 
Hyde,  President  of  the  Gaelic  League,  who  has  done  more 
than  any  living  man  for  the  study  of  Gaelic.  But  Mr. 
Yeats  has  with  M.  Maeterlinck,  another  mystic  of  like 
character,  an  underlying  instinct  for  practical  affairs,  and 
he  has  done  more  for  the  literary  revival  in  Ireland  by 
inspiring  others  with  a  common  hope  and  ideal  than  by 
any  writing  of  his  own,  important  as  that  is.  To  his 
unwavering  enthusiasm  is  to  be  attributed  the  growth 
of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre  from  its  beginnings  in  London 
with  English  actors,  through  its  vicissitudes  and  progress 
in  Dublin  from  the  Antient  Concert  Rooms  to  the  Abbey 

163 


164      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

Theatre  with  its  company  of  native  actors  and  actresses. 
The  genius  of  Mr.  Yeats  is  undramatic,  but  he  has  been 
the  cause  that  drama  is  in  others.  He  discovered  Synge 
and  persuaded  him  to  return  to  Ireland  to  write  great 
drama  in  place  of  commonplace  critiques  of  French 
authors  ;  he  united  as  workers  with  one  aim  Mr.  Edward 
Martyn,  Mr.  Rutherford  Mayne,  Mr.  Padraic  Colum  and 
others  whom  it  were  needless  to  name  ;  he  brought  Lady 
Gregory  into  the  group,  to  relieve  with  her  native  gift 
of  farcical  humour  a  repertory  that  inclined  the  scale  too 
far  in  the  direction  of  the  sombre,  the  tragic  and  the  purely 
literary  ;  and  for  a  short  time  the  scepticism  of  Mr.  George 
Moore  yielded  to  the  spell  of  his  enthusiasm,  and  the 
absentee  Irish  landlord-author  remembered  his  own  land. 
By  the  power  to  communicate  a  personal  enthusiasm  Mr. 
Yeats  has  been  the  prompter  in  others  of  more  good  work 
than  he  himself  has  produced  ;  for,  despite  the  beauty  of 
part,  and  especially  the  earlier  part,  of  his  work  as  a  poet, 
his  genius  as  a  writer  of  lyric  has  greatly  failed  him  since 
he  published  The  Wind  Among  the  Reeds  (1899)  ;  and  his 
finest  poetry  after  that  date  appears  in  isolated  passages 
of  the  dramas,  and  more  especially  in  The  Shadowy  Waters 
(1900)  and  Deirdre  (1907).  Despite  a  career  of  literary 
activity  that  is  now  not  short  the  quantity  of  Mr.  Yeats' 
poetry  that  is  of  a  high  order  is  not  large.  Not  all  the 
shorter  lyrics  are  noteworthy ;  none  rises  to  the  same 
plane  of  mystic  rapture  as  the  more  inspired  lines  of 
A.  E. ;  the  beauty  of  one  or  two  of  the  verse  dramas 
is  a  beauty  sustained  in  spite  of  the  form  and  context  ; 
but  in  three  poems,  The  Wanderings  ofOisin,  The  Countess 
Cathleen  and  The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire,  Mr.  Yeats  has 
conceived  and  written  something  that  is  peculiarly  his 
own  and  of  a  character  that  once  written  will  not  easily 
be  forgotten. 

The  close  of  the  last  century  saw  a  marked  revival  of 
interest  in  things  Irish  and  of  all  that  is  best  in  Irish  life. 
The  National  Literary  Society  was  founded  in  Dublin  in 
1892  ;  in  1893  the  Gaelic  League  was  established,  and  in 
the  same  year  the  Irish  Literary  Society  in  London  held 
its  first  meeting.  A  little  later,  in  1899,  the  Irish  Literary 
Theatre  arranged  its  first  performances  in  Dublin.  Before 
this  new  growth  of  interest  in  national  life  and  literature 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  165 

definitely  manifested  itself  to  the  outward  eye  and  became 
known  beyond  Ireland  Mr.  Yeats  had  won  his  laurels, 
and  nothing  that  he  has  written  since  the  inauguration 
of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre  has  affected  or  enhanced 
his  position  as  a  poet. 

Mr.  William  Butler  Yeats,  the  son  of  an  Irish  artist, 
was  born  in  Dublin  in  1865.  His  father's  following  first 
led  him  to  the  study  of  painting,  but  he  soon  began  to 
contribute  poems  and  stories  to  Irish  periodicals.  In 
these  years  his  imagination  grew  under  the  spell  of  the 
folk-tales  and  myths  of  older  Ireland  and  the  greys  and 
greens  of  Irish  landscape.  Delving  in  libraries  among 
translations  from  the  Gaelic  and  sitting  by  turf-fires  in 
Connaught  he  saturated  his  mind  in  mystic  tale,  legend 
and  song,  and  he  passed  on  to  edit  folk  and  fairy  tales 
and  stories  from  Carleton.  He  has  since  continued  the 
practice  of  prose,  and  from  this  early  date  Mr.  Yeats'  work 
may  be  divided  into  miscellaneous  prose,  that  poetry 
which  is  primarily  lyric  and  the  dramatic  poetry  which 
followed  upon  the  foundation  of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre. 
From  another  standpoint  three  stages  can  be  traced  in 
Mr.  Yeats'  development.  First  came  his  early  and  ten- 
tative work  when  he  was  writing  under  the  influence  of 
models  and  seeking  a  path  of  his  own  ;  this  was  followed 
by  the  well-defined  symbolism  of  The  Wind  Among  the 
Reeds,  '  Rosa  Alchemica  '  and  Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil ; 
and,  lastly,  the  symbolic  manner  has,  in  some  of  the 
plavs,  been  brought  into  closer  contact  with  everyday 
life!' 

The  first  two  stages  of  the  development  here  sketched 
are  more  clearly  illustrated  in  Mr.  Yeats'  prose  than  in 
his  verse.  The  editing  of  older  stories  naturally  led  him 
to  attempt  prose-fiction,  and  in  1891  he  made  a  beginning 
with  two  tales,  John  Sherman  and  Dhoya.  Neither  of 
these  is  singularly  promising.  The  first  is  a  creditable 
study  of  character  set  against  a  background  of  contem- 
porary life  in  a  country  town  of  Sligo  ;  the  second  is  a 
myth  story,  derivative  in  its  manner  and  betraying  little 
of  that  sensitiveness  which  belongs  to  his  later  work. 
In  The  Celtic  Twilight  (1893)  are  collected  essays  drawn 
from  the  associations  of  the  author's  early  life  and  his 
acquaintance  with  the  peasantry  of  Ireland,  especially 


166      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

of  County  Sligo.  The  volume  contains  stories,  sketches, 
accounts  of  superstitions  and  visions  of  people  of  the  faery 
told  in  a  simple  and  exquisite  prose  of  limited  vocabulary. 
And  the  Stories  of  Red  Hanrahan  (1904)  are  tales  of  a 
similar  character,  grouped  about  the  central  personality 
of  Hanrahan,  the  hedge  schoolmaster.  The  esoteric  mood 
of  Mr.  Yeats  is  fully  pronounced  in  the  wholly  mystical 
Secret  Rose  (1897)  and  The  Tables  of  the  Law  (1897). 
'  Rosa  Alchemica,'  the  longest  and  most  striking  story 
in  the  first  volume,  appeared  in  The  Savoy,  as  did  The 
Tables  of  the  Law.  In  the  latter  we  note  that  convention 
and  petrifaction  of  symbolism  which  marks  the  decadence 
of  a  spiritual  faith  into  a  dogmatic  mythology.  The 
tendency  to  fossilise  symbols  is  carried  over  into  Mr. 
Yeats'  most  distinctive  book  of  literary  and  artistic 
criticism,  Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil  (1903),  a  title  typically 
borrowed  from  Blake.  And  this  progressive  tendency 
toward  the  stereotyping  of  mystical  ideas  may  be  traced 
from  Mr.  Yeats'  early  and  simple  lyrics  through  The  Wind 
Among  the  Reeds,  and  In  the  Seven  Woods  to  The  Green 
Helmet. 

The  atmosphere  of  Mr.  Yeats'  mysticism  has  often  been 
attributed  as  much  to  the  influence  of  Maeterlinck  as  to 
Irish  myth  and  folk-lore  ;  but  the  attribution  appears  to 
have  little  basis  in  fact.  It  argues  nothing  to  speak  of  the 
melancholy  of  either  writer,  the  inward  happiness,  the 
passionate  sympathy  with  the  lonely  and  mysterious  lot 
of  man,  the  consciousness  of  unreality  in  the  visible  world, 
for  these  have  been  common  to  mystics  of  all  ages.  A 
parallelism  may  be  discovered  in  that  both  writers  are 
products  of  the  civilisation  of  modern  cities,  who  seek 
amid  the  refinements  of  external  life  to  cultivate  a 
nebulous  haven  of  peace  in  a  vague  and  metaphysical 
region.  But  The  Wanderings  of  Oisin  and  The  Countess 
Cathleen  had  been  written  or  conceived  before  the  work 
of  Maeterlinck  was  known  on  this  side  of  the  channel ; 
and,  thus  early,  the  twilight  outline  common  to  both 
writers  was  fully  developed  ;  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
Mr.  Yeats  does  not  cultivate  the  artifice  of  the  shadowy 
and  unknown  terror  which  pervades  the  work  of  the 
author  of  Les  Aveugles  and  La  Mori  de  Tiniagiles.  If 
Maeterlinck  counts  for  little,  it  may  fairly  be  doubted 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  167 

whether  the  later  mysticism  of  Mr.  Yeats  would  ever 
have  come  into  being  save  for  the  influence  of  the  French 
symbolists,  Rimbaud,  Villiers  de  1'Isle  Adam  and  Theodore 
de  Banville.  Nor  must  the  influence  of  Blake,  whose  works 
Mr.  Yeats  has,  in  conjunction  with  Mr.  E.  J.  Ellis,  edited, 
be  forgotten.  Blake's  mysticism  is,  however,  despite  his 
soaring  imagination,  often  simple  and  homely.  The 
family  scenes  in  the  illustrations  to  the  book  of  Job  are 
emblematic  of  his  mind.  In  Mr.  Yeats  enters  the  tinge 
of  aristrocratic  aloofness  from  common  life,  a  trait  which 
belongs  to  his  temper,  in  which  also  he  found  a  com- 
panion in  Villiers  de  1'Isle  Adam,  from  whom  he  quotes 
often  the  saying,  "  As  for  living  our  servants  will  do  that 
for  us."  Celtic  legend,  Oriental  tale,  Blake  and  the  French 
Symbolists,  all  these  have  contributed  to  the  formation 
of  Mr.  Yeats'  vision  of  life  over  and  above  the  natural 
endowment  of  his  mind  ;  for,  as  Mr.  George  Moore  in 
his  last  apostasy  and  disillusion  has  pointed  out,  his 
inspiration  visits  him  from  literature,  not  life.  As  clearly 
as  his  brother,  Mr.  Jack  B.  Yeats,  draws  the  inspiration 
of  his  painting  from  life,  not  art,  as  clearly  as  Synge 
discovered  the  supreme  interest  not  in  books  but  in  living 
men  and  the  spoken  word,  so  clearly  does  Mr.  Yeats 
breathe  only  in  the  atmosphere  of  intellectual  and  literary 
concepts.  And  in  this  characteristic,  at  least,  Mr.  Yeats 
is  the  fellow  of  M.  Maeterlinck. 

Mr.  Yeats'  earliest  lyrics  are  not  peculiarly  distinctive 
of  his  genius,  and  they  betray  little  kinship,  with  the  fully 
developed  mysticism  of  his  later  poems.  He  had  not 
then  learned,  in  Blake's  words,  to  see  "  through  not  with 
the  eye  "  ;  and  one  of  these  early  poems,  '  The  Song  of 
the  Happy  Shepherd,'  with  its  question  whether  the  thirst 
of  knowledge  and  hunger  of  truth  may  be  but  misleading 
impulses  and  all  truth  be  found  in  the  heart,  indicates  a 
hesitating  and  experimental  stage  of  thought.  The  early 
poems  which  borrow  from  Hindoo  mysticism  are  lacking 
in  the  poet's  individual  manner  ;  but  '  The  Madness  of 
King  Goll '  contains  the  hint  of  the  future  poet  of  Celtic 
mysticism.  And  besides  this  there  are  poems,  like  '  The 
Ballad  of  Father  O'Hart '  and  '  Moll  Magee,'  which  touch 
Irish  life  in  a  vein  of  simple  pathos.  But  finer  far  than 
'Father  O'Hart'  is  'The  Ballad  of  Father  Gilligan,' 


168      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

which  in  its  choice  of  subject  illustrates  the  development 
of  the  mystical  reading  of  life  in  Mr.  Yeats'  mind.  In 
the  earlier  poem  the  keening  of  the  birds  for  Father 
O'Hart  scarcely  carries  us  away  from  the  setting  of  the 
fairy  tale.  In  '  Father  Gilligan  '  the  story  of  the  priest 
who  nods  asleep  in  his  chair  through  weariness  when 
he  should  be  consoling  the  last  hours  of  a  dying  parish- 
ioner is  raised  to  a  plane  far  above  the  conventional. 
The  old  priest  wakes  and  rides  through  the  night  to 
find  that  he  is  late,  but  God  has  been  before  sending 
one  of  his  angels  to  minister  the  last  rites.  And  the 
old  man  kneels  to  whisper, 

"  He  who  is  wrapped  in  purple  robes, 
With  planets  in  his  care, 
Had  pity  on  the  least  of  things 
Asleep  upon  a  chair." 

But  it  is  in  the  single  volume  of  The  Wind  Among  the 
Reeds  (1899)  that  Mr.  Yeats  reaches  his  finest  and  most 
original  work  in  shorter  lyrics.  These  mystical  broodings 
of  spirit  lie  outside  the  highway  of  poetry,  and,  though 
not  untouched  by  the  sophistries  of  the  cultured  world, 
they  are  as  unintelligible  to  the  common  mind  as  the 
arcana  of  Blake.  Yet  Mr.  Yeats  has  lived  more  among 
men  than  Blake,  he  has  more  of  the  wisdom  of  the  children 
of  this  world,  and  he  is  not  guiltless  of  conscious  artifice 
where  Blake  would  have  been  wholly  natural  and  with- 
out self-consciousness.  Among  those  poems  directly 
founded  upon  Irish  legend  '  The  Old  Age  of  Queen  Maeve  ' 
is  noteworthy  for  its  epic  note  and  the  cadences  of  its 
blank  verse,  and  its  melody  brings  it  into  sharp  contrast 
with  '  Bailie  and  Aillinn,'  another  poem  founded  upon 
Irish  legend,  written  in  rhyming  octosyllables  which  suffer 
from  a  tendency  to  jostling  haste.  Perhaps  the  most 
beautiful  poems  of  the  volume  are  '  The  Host  of  the 
Air,'  '  Into  the  Twilight '  and  '  The  Song  of  Wandering 
uEngus.'  '  The  Host  of  the  Air  '  has  that  incommunic- 
able magic  of  prosody  making,  as  in  '  La  Belle  Dame 
sans  Merci '  and  '  Kubla  Khan,'  pure  poetry  for  its  own 
sake.  The  poem  which  tells  how  in  dreaming  vision 
O'Driscoll  saw — 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  169 

"...  young  men  and  young  girls 
Who  danced  on  a  level  place, 
And  Bridget  his  bride  among  them, 
With  a  sad  and  a  gay  face." 
and  how — 

"The  dancers  crowded  about  him, 
And  many  a  sweet  thing  said, 
And  a  young  man  brought  him  red  wine 
And  a  young  girl  white  bread." 

considered  only  as  prosody  does  not  come  short  of  Mr. 
Yeats'  better  known  poem,  '  The  Lake  Isle  of  Innisfree.' 

The  year  1899  not  only  saw  the  publication  of  The  Wind 
Among  the  Reeds,  it  found  the  poet  busied  with  the  workings 
of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre,  and  it  marked  a  point  of 
rapid  declination  in  Mr.  Yeats'  lyric  powers.  In  the  Seven 
Woods  (1903)  contains  no  poetry  as  individual  as  the 
preceding  volume,  though  it  includes  the  stirring  stanzas 
of  '  Red  Hanrahan's  Song,'  a  poem  which,  with  splendid 
imagery  of  clouds,  winds,  yellow  pools  and  flooding  waters, 
breathes  the  love  of  Ireland's  bare  hills,  bog  waters  and 
warm  soft  rain.  Other  songs,  however,  '  O  do  not  love 
too  long '  and  '  Never  Give  All  the  Heart,'  for  example, 
suggest  purely  English  and  Elizabethan  rather  than  Celtic 
models.  The  short  series  of  love  poems  printed  in 
The  Green  Helmet  (1910)  are  metaphysical  and  not  very 
distinctive. 

If  not  with  the  short  lyric,  with  poems  of  a  different 
kind  Mr.  Yeats  has  shown  himself  the  poet  of  an  esoteric 
beauty  in  a  character  and  a  manner  that  is  all  his  own. 
Further  The  Wanderings  of  Oisin  (1889),  The  Countess 
Cathleen  (1892)  and  The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire  (1894), 
poems  in  dialogue,  may  be  regarded  as  the  prelude  to 
Mr.  Yeats'  phase  as  a  dramatic  poet.  The  first  version 
of  The  Wanderings  of  Oisin,  compared  with  the  revised 
text  which  Mr.  Yeats  subsequently  printed,  was  a  youth- 
ful and  diffuse  poem.  Often  weak  in  style,  it  was  also 
far  from  consistently  happy  in  phrase  or  imagery.  In 
its  later  guise  Mr.  Yeats'  first  long  essay  in  verse  has 
become  a  poem  of  a  beauty  and  distinction  that  is  rare. 
It  is  in  form  derived  from  the  Middle  Irish  dialogues  of 
St.  Patrick  and  Oisin,  and  represents  the  mythic  hero 
relating  to  the  saint  the  story  of  his  wanderings  in  the 


170      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

paradises  of  pagan  mythology  and  his  passionate  love 
ot  Niarn.  It  may  be  noted  that  contrasts  of  paganism 
and  Christianity,  which  appear  thus  early,  are  of  frequent 
recurrence  in  Mr.  Yeats'  poetry.  The  saint  warns  Oisin 
to  repent  lest  his  soul  be  lost 

"  Through  the  demon  love  of  its  youth  and  its  godless 
and  passionate  age." 

But  a  pale  and  bloodless  creed  has  no  power  over  the 
soul  of  Oisin  :  he  hopes  to  join  the  Fenian  heroes,  his 
comrades  of  old  time,  even  though  they  be  tossed  on  the 
floor  of  hell. 

"  I  will  go  to  Caolte,  and  Conan,  and  Bran,  Sgeolan,  Lomair, 
And  dwell  in  the  house  of  the  Fenians,  be  they  in  flames 
or  at  feast." 

The  most  striking  characteristic  of  this  early  poem  is  that 
curious  impression  of  the  supernatural  which  Mr.  Yeats 
can  convey  in  narrative  verse  with  a  power  and  a  magic 
that  is  beyond  the  reach  of  any  other  English-writing 
poet.  Many  have  striven  to  give  the  poetry  of  myth  and 
legend  the  atmosphere  of  the  eerie  and  otherworldly,  Mr. 
Yeats  achieves  it  to  a  quite  extraordinary  degree.  Others 
may  labour  for  a  time  to  divest  themselves  of  the  trappings 
of  externality  ;  the  poetry  of  Mr.  Yeats  is  a  poetry  of 
dreams  more  true  than  the  things  seen  with  the  physical 
eye.  Mere  study  of  technique  in  verse  melody  or  in 
diction  scarcely  serves  to  explain  how  this  effect  is  gained  ; 
but,  as  Swinburne  snatches  from  the  air  music  which 
haunts  the  memory,  though  we  recall  no  thought  nor 
even  a  clear  image,  so  in  the  poetry  of  Mr.  Yeats  we  are 
caught  up  into  the  kingdom  of  faery  as  Niam  carried 
Oisin  to  the  land  where  "  days  pass  like  a  wayward  time." 
The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire  is  closely  united  in  mood 
and  atmosphere  with  The  Wanderings  of  Oisin.  It  also  is 
imbued  with  the  paganism  of  older  Ireland,  and  it  has 
to  do  "  with  vast  and  shadowy  activities  and  with  the 
great  impersonal  emotions."  The  poem,  with  its  graceful 
and  tender  story  of  one  who  was  snatched  by  the  fairies 
to  the  land 

"  Where  beauty  has  no  ebb,  decay  no  flood, 
But  joy  is  wisdom,  Time  an  endless  song/' 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  171 

is  an  altogether  beautiful  and  almost  perfect  piece  of 
writing.  The  Countess  Caihleen  is  broadly  contrasted  with 
these  two  poems,  for  it  is  Christian  in  spirit  and  treats 
of  the  moral  emotions.  It  narrates  the  fortunes  of  the 
Countess  who  sells  her  soul  to  demons  in  order  to  gain 
money  to  help  the  poor  in  time  of  famine.  Yet  her  soul  is 
accepted  in  heaven,  for 

"The  Light  of  Lights 

Looks  always  on  the  motive,  not  the  deed, 
The  Shadow  of  Shadows  on  the  deed  alone." 

The  handling  of  the  blank  verse,  even  in  the  latest  version 
of  The  Countess  Cathleen,  is  not  always  competent,  and 
in  this  respect  the  poem,  for  beauty  and  melody  of  verse, 
will  not  compare  with  The  Shadowy  Waters.  But  it 
reflects  skill  in  the  use  of  epithets  and  proper  names 
— Balor,  Cailtin,  Sualtam,  Dectara — always  an  ornament 
of  English  blank  verse  since  the  time  of  Milton.  And  Mr. 
Yeats  does  not  fail  to  give  dramatic  unity  to  The  Countess 
Cathleen,  not  by  any  interplay  of  passion  and  emotion 
directed  to  an  end,  but  by  a  sustained  and  unfaltering 
poetic  intensity. 

These  poems  are  dramatic  only  in  form  :  essentially 
they  are  lyrics  written  in  dialogue,  though  The  Land  of 
Heart's  Desire  was  a  sufficient  success  upon  the  stage  to 
be  played  at  the  Avenue  Theatre  for  six  weeks  in  1894. 
From  the  first,  however,  dramatic  writing  has  been  near 
to  the  poet's  heart,  and,  when  opportunity  arose  with  the 
foundation  of  the  Irish  Theatre,  Mr.  Yeats  turned  to  the 
composition  of  drama  written  both  in  verse  and  prose. 
But  of  all  his  work  in  the  last  eighteen  years  it  can  only 
be  said  that  it  illustrates  a  weaker  dramatic  gift  than  that 
possessed  by  other  lyric  poets  of  the  century — Tennyson, 
Shelley,  Beddoes,  for  example.  His  plays  are  undramatic, 
for  they  move  in  a  shadowy  world  of  vague  symbols  ; 
and  in  the  effort  to  reach  the  highest  plane  of  the  poetic 
art,  the  rendering  in  dramatic  speech  of  great  poetry, 
he  is,  save  in  isolated  passages,  less  a  poet  than  in  the 
long  lyrics  in  dialogue  and  the  short  lyrics  of  The  Wind 
Among  the  Reeds.  Several  of  the  dramas  are  in  prose 
and  may  more  fitly  be  named  in  another  chapter  with 
the  work  of  the  Irish  playwrights,  and  even  here  the 


172      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

verse  dramas  need  only  be  characterised  briefly,  for  as 
poems  they  are  less  than  the  work  of  Mr.  Yeats'  earlier 
years. 

According  to  Mr.  Yeats  he  contemplated  from  boy- 
hood the  story  of  The  Shadowy  Waters  (1900),  and  the 
poem,  much  changed  when  staged  in  1904,  represents  the 
fruit  of  many  years  of  musing  upon  and  retouching  an 
age-old  theme — the  quest  of  the  soul's  desire.  Forgael, 
dissatisfied  with  earthly  love,  sails  in  search  of  that  land 
where  love  is  imperishable.  The  poet's  long  preoccupation 
with  the  tale  explains  not  only  the  wistful  dreaminess  of 
the  drama  but  further  the  beautiful  cadence  of  the  blank 
verse,  which  is  the  best  Mr.  Yeats  has  written.  In  On 
Bailees  Strand  (1903)  prose  and  verse  are  combined  in  the 
telling  of  the  widely  diffused  story  of  the  father  who 
inadvertently  slays  his  son.  And,  thrown  into  contrast 
with  the  heroic  legend  of  Cuchulain,  Mr.  Yeats  introduces 
roughspun  humour  in  the  figures  of  the  Fool  and  the 
Blind  Man.  But  the  welding  of  the  two  is  unskilful ; 
and,  all  in  all,  the  action  is  a  little  awkward  and  the  drama 
unnecessarily  lengthy  for  the  working  out  of  its  theme. 
Compared  with  these  The  King's  Threshold  (1904)  and 
The  Green  Helmet  (1910)  are  slight  and  occasional.  The 
latter,  written  in  rhyming  fourteeners,  is  described  as 
heroic  farce,  and  though  it  may  please  with  its  curious 
mingling  of  the  startling,  fantastic  and  heroic  in  a  single 
act,  it  can  only  give  pleasure  by  an  effect  other  than 
dramatic.  Deirdre  (1907),  which  was  successfully  produced 
at  the  Abbey  Theatre,  Dublin,  is  less  mystical  and  more 
dramatic  than  The  Shadowy  Waters  ;  and,  though  Mr. 
Yeats'  setting  of  the  story  is  weaker  than  the  fine  version 
of  Synge,  the  theme  lends  itself  to  dramatic  treatment 
and  the  author  has  not  elsewhere  handled  a  tragic  story 
with  equal  strength.  In  moments  of  great  crisis,  as  the 
Greek  and  Elizabethan  dramatists  understood,  men  and 
women  speak  impersonally  with  a  cadence  of  universal 
meaning.  In  Deirdre  Mr.  Yeats  realised  this  truth  ;  and 
not  a  few  splendid  passages  of  great  impersonal  speech 
remain  in  the  memory  after  reading  the  poem.  And  thus, 
as  also  is  the  case  with  Synge' s  play,  Mr.  Yeats'  treat- 
ment of  the  Deirdre  story  is  not  peculiarly  Irish.  In 
illustration  of  the  statement  that  the  verse  of  Deirdre 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  173 

is  written  upon  the  model  of  Elizabethan  drama  a  passage 
may  be  quoted  from  one  of  Deirdre's  speeches  : 

"  Oh,  singing  women,  set  it  down  in  a  book 
That  love  is  all  we  need,  even  though  it  is 
But  the  last  drops  we  gather  up  like  this ; 
And  though  the  drops  are  all  we  have  known  of  life, 
For  we  have  been  most  friendless — praise  us  for  it 
And  praise  the  double  sunset,  for  nought's  lacking, 
But  a  good  end  to  the  long,  cloudy  day." 

To  the  national  and  literary  enthusiasm  aroused  by  the 
Irish  Theatre  is  due  a  large  part  of  the  strongest  and  most 
imaginative  work  of  Irish  writers  in  the  past  fifteen  years  ; 
and  not  a  little  of  the  modern  drama  of  Ireland  is  indirectly 
attributable  to  Mr.  Yeats.  But  in  his  own  person  he 
has  contributed  nothing  of  importance  to  drama  ;  what 
value  his  plays  possess  lies  in  their  poetry  and  not  in  any 
dramatic  quality.  Nearly  every  lyric  poet  of  the  last 
century  deviated  for  a  time  into  dramatic  writing  ;  yet 
Shelley's  Cenci  remains  the  greatest  achievement  of  the 
century  in  poetic  drama,  and  this  is  better  read  in  the 
study,  indeed  almost  impossible  on  the  stage.  The  nine- 
teenth century  saw  no  great  poetic  drama  ;  and  Mr.  Yeats 
has  not  succeeded  where  many  have  failed.  The  failure 
was  inevitable,  for  even  in  prose  his  dramatic  writing 
is  not  comparable  to  that  of  several  living  writers  of  his 
country.  It  cannot  be  known  whether  in  his  effort  to 
write  drama  he  checked  his  lyric  faculty  or  whether  his 
native  gifts  were  already  on  the  wane  when  he  adopted 
the  dramatic  form;  but,  whatever  the  cause,  Mr.  Yeats* 
finest  work  as  a  poet  belongs  to  ten  or  eleven  years,  from 
1889  to  1899.  In  the  three  long  lyric  dialogues  of  this 
period  and  the  shorter  poems  of  The  Wind  Among  the 
Reeds  is  contained  a  body  of  poetry  unique  of  its  kind  in 
the  present  generation.  They  set  the  writer  apart  as 
the  poet  of  Celtic  myth  and  dream.  The  poetry  of  A.  E., 
though  it  has  a  greatness  in  simplicity  lacking  in  the 
poetry  of  more  complex  emotions  significant  of  Mr.  Yeats' 
character,  is  by  no  means  entirely  typical  of  those  traits 
associated  with  the  Celtic  temper.  His  poems  are  hortatory, 
joyous  and  optimistic;  and  A.  E.  can  sometimes  exult 
almost  with  the  abandon  to  life  of  Whitman.  His  love 


174      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

of  his  land  is  not  with  the  wistful  dreaminess  of  the  Celt, 
but  with  gladness  and  strong  hope. 

The  work  of  A.  E.  as  a  poet  is  neither  large  in  content 
nor  greatly  diversified  in  matter.     Homeward,   his  first 

collection,  appeared  in  1894,  and  each  of 
A.  E.,  the  succeeding  small  volumes  repeated 

George  W.  poems    from   earlier    collections,    till    the 

Russell,  b.  1867.    whole   was   gathered   in    Collected  Poems 

(1913).  Nor  does  A.  E.  betray  any  peculiar 
skill  in  diction,  rhythm  and  metre,  for  his  vocabulary  is 
narrow,  and  his  metrical  experiments  are  usually  of  the 
simplest  and  follow  the  standards  set  by  Tennyson  or 
Swinburne.  He  has  a  liking  for  long  anapaestic  measures, 
and  with  these,  where  few  have  been  entirely  successful, 
he  does  not  fail.  In  melody  he  is,  perhaps,  at  his  best 
with  anapaests.  Nor,  again,  do  we  often  meet  in  his  verse 
with  the  inspired  and  magical  phrase  which  lingers  unfor- 
gettable in  the  memory.  To  art  he  owes  little  (though  he 
seldom  offends  in  technique)  :  but  his  slender  volumes 
carry  with  them  the  soul  of  poetry  in  their  rapture,  their 
spiritual  exaltation,  their  glad  consciousness  of  kinship 
between  the  mind  of  man  and  the  moods  of  earth.  By 
his  admirers  he  has  been  called  a  great  poet ;  the 
praise  must  be  denied  him  if  it  means  that  he  is  to  be 
counted  with  the  supreme  poets  of  the  world.  In  gift  of 
song  and  in  range  of  thought  and  vision  A.  E.  has  plain 
limitations.  The  recurring  motif  of  many  of  the  poems 
— the  unity  of  conscious  life  in  the  universe — may  tend 
to  weariness  in  the  end.  And  this  constant  theme  shows 
that  his  inspiration  has  come  to  him  not  through  the 
broad  channels  of  English  poetry,  but  from  pagan  Ireland, 
the  Bhagavad  Gita,  the  Upanishads  and  the  mystics  of 
all  ages.  The  most  personal  of  his  poems  are  those  which 
sing,  in  the  gladness  of  a  pantheistic  faith,  the  joy  and 
melancholy  of  the  grey  woods,  the  upturned  soil,  the 
deeps  of  the  sky  and  the  far  reaches  of  the  sombre  sea. 
In  poems  of  men  and  women  he  may  be  purely  imitative. 

"  From  the  heat  that  melts  together  oft  a  rarer  essence  slips, 
And  our  hearts  may  still  be  parted  at  the  meeting  of  the  lips  "- 

resembles  in  image  and   phrase  the  weaker  manner  of 
Tennyson  or  Moore.     Merely  pretty  lines,  however,  sur- 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  175 

prise   us    by  their   unlikeness  to   his   true  character  as 
a  poet. 

Mr.  Yeats  has  addressed  A.  E.  as  "the  one  poet  of 
modern  Ireland  who  has  moulded  a  spiritual  ecstasy  in 
verse,"  and  described  his  poems  as  revealing  "  in  all 
things  a  kind  of  scented  flame  consuming  them  from 
within."  No  other  words  could  as  well  state  the  essential 
character  of  the  poet  and  his  work.  In  the  beauty  and 
power  of  a  spiritual  fervour  no  poetry  of  to-day,  not  that 
of  Francis  Thompson,  has  the  skiey  light  and  depth  of 
the  work  of  A.  E.  The  ideas  of  a  pantheistic  philosophy 
are  in  all  his  poems  ;  for  him  there  is  no  gulf  fixed  between 
the  physical  and  the  spiritual  ;  the  beauty  of  the  land 
of  heart's  desire  is  wreathed  with  the  sombre  hues  of 
earth. 

"  And  one  thing  after  another 

Was  whispered  out  of  the  air, 
How  God  was  a  big,  kind  brother 

Whose  home  is  in  everywhere. 

His  light  like  a  smile  comes  glancing 

Through  the  cool,  cool  winds  as  they  pass, 

From  the  flowers  in  heaven  dancing 
To  the  stars  that  shine  in  the  grass. 

From  the  clouds  in  deep  blue  wreathing 

And  most  from  the  mountains  tall, 
But  God  like  a  wind  goes  breathing 

A  dream  of  Himself  in  all." 

The  joyous  faith  is  repeated  in  the  musings  of  '  The  Earth 
Breath,'  '  The  Dream  of  the  Children,'  '  In  the  Womb,' 
'  The  Gates  of  Dreamland  '  and  '  The  Twilight  of  Earth.' 
Earth  is  a  never-failing  source  of  inspiration  to  the  poetry 
of  A.  E.  He  never  writes  with  higher  fervour  and  exalta- 
tion than  of  the  mother-earth  whence  we  are  sprung. 

"  I,  thy  child  who  went  forth  radiant 

In  the  golden  prime, 
Find  thee  still  the  mother-hearted 

Through  my  night  in  time  ; 
Find  in  thee  the  old  enchantment 

There  behind  the  veil 
Where  the  gods,  my  brothers,  linger, 

Hail,  forever,  hail !  " 


176      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

Not  only  is  A.  E.  a  poet — he  is  a  painter,  a  critic,  a 
public  speaker,  the  chief  worker  of  the  Irish  Agricultural 
Organisation  Society.  And  whatever  the  task  to  which 
he  sets  himself  he  carries  into  it  a  mystic  and  spiritual 
enthusiasm.  But  he  is  first  a  poet,  and  a  poet  who  has, 
despite  the  limitation  of  some  monotony  in  thought  and 
motif,  a  splendour  of  colour,  a  glow  of  faith,  and  a  soul- 
uplifted  anticipation  in  which  Mrs.  Woods  and  Mr.  Herbert 
Trench  alone  among  living  poets  may  sometimes  be 
counted  in  the  same  fellowship  with  him.  It  is  a  fact 
noteworthy  and  of  significance  that  Ireland  can  produce 
in  a  single  generation  two  poets  of  such  manifest  and  high 
genius,  who  betray  parallelisms  yet  differ  so  far  in  thought 
and  method,  as  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  and  A.  E.  The  elusive 
rhythms,  the  esotericism,  the  wistfulness  of  Mr.  Yeats  are 
exchanged  in  A.  E.  for  a  powerful  spiritual  exaltation. 
In  either  case  we  have  a  vision  of  life  ceaselessly  poetical. 
On  A.  E.  and  Mr.  Yeats  the  gift  of  poetic  genius  has 
been  bestowed  in  full  measure,  and  in  the  work  of  other 
singers  of  modern  Ireland  it  is  but  incidentally  that  we 
meet  with  a  poem  of  greater  inspiration.  It  would  be 
hard  to  rate  above  its  value  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde's  work 
for  Irish  nationalism  and  literature ;  but  he  is  to  be 

counted  with  the  scholars  and  trans- 
Douglas  Hyde,  lators.  Outside  his  own  country  he  is 
b.  1860.  best  known  by  his  Literary  History  of 

Ireland  (1899) ;  in  Ireland  he  is  loved  as 
the  author  of  Gaelic  poems  and  plays ;  and  in  the 
older  language  he  has  chosen  to  write  the  greater  part 
of  his  creative  work.  It  must  not,  however,  be  forgotten 
that  in  his  Love  Songs  of  Connacht  (1894)  and  Religious 
Songs  of  Connacht  (1906)  he  reveals  himself  as  a  trans- 
lator of  fine  literary  attainment,  and  with  these  trans- 
lations he  has  greatly  influenced  the  English  style  of 
other  writers  in  the  Irish  movement. 

The  Irish  origin  claimed  by  Lionel  Pigot  Johnson  was 
a  literary  affectation,  and  he  is  only  loosely  to  be  counted 

with  the  poets  of  modern  Ireland. 
Lionel  Pigot  Johnson,  He  received  a  good  classical  edu- 
1867-1902.  cation ;  Winchester,  Oxford  and 

London  formed  the  background  of 
his  life  ;  and  the  impulse  to  write  came  to  him  through 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  177 

the  highways  of  Greek,  Latin  and  English  literature. 
Johnson  was  a  widely  and  wisely  read  man.  At  school 
he  early  displayed  an  interest  in  literature  ;  and  after  he 
went  up  to  New  College,  Oxford,  in  1886,  the  chief  influences 
upon  his  prose  style  were  Samuel  Johnson  and  Walter 
Pater,  a  conjunction  of  names  not  so  curious,  perhaps, 
as  at  first  it  appears.  From  Oxford  he  went  to  London, 
and  soon  became  reviewer  to  a  number  of  periodicals. 
He  had  long  been  out  of  sympathy  with  the  Anglicanism 
in  which  he  had  been  educated,  and  in  1891  he  was 
received  into  the  Church  of  Rome.  From  this  point 
in  his  life  Catholic  tradition  together  with  a  love  of 
Ireland,  which  he  adopted  to  himself,  became  the  primary 
influences  upon  his  work  and  poetry.  Unfortunately 
these  better  influences  were  checked  by  the  growing 
habit  of  intemperance  to  which  was  due  his  early  death 
in  1902. 

Lionel  Johnson  had  little  gift  of  unpremeditated  song. 
He  was  the  maker  of  chiselled  verses  composed  in  the 
rhythms  of  a  vocabulary  borrowed  from  Latin,  though 
he  never  wove  so  elaborate  and  gorgeous  a  brocade  of 
Latinisms  as  Francis  Thompson.  His  two  volumes  of 
verse,  Poems  (1895)  and  Ireland  with  Other  Poems  (1897), 
reflect  a  mind  illumined  by  the  familiar  knowledge  of 
great  poetry.  For  so  habitual  a  quoter  in  writing 
prose,  in  verse  he  has  singularly  few  direct  borrowings 
from  classical  or  contemporary  poetry.  His  chief  themes 
are  the  peaceful  solitudes  of  moor  and  woodland,  the 
companionship  of  books,  Ireland,  the  purity  and  mystic 
tradition  of  Catholic  asceticism.  His  note  is  often  elegiac, 
many  of  the  poems  have  a  note  of  restrained  melancholy, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  splendid  '  Sancta  Silvarum  ' 
and  other  nature  poems  reveal  a  spirit  of  conscious  joy 
in  the  mystery  of  life  and  the  beauty  of  the  universe. 
His  verse  is  often  ornate,  mannered  and  stiff ;  but,  as 
in  the  delightful  lines  addressed  to  Charles  Lamb,  he  can 
be  tender,  simple  and  unaffected.  In  his  more  ambitious 
manner  '  The  Dark  Angel '  is  distinguished  by  the  pas- 
sionate sincerity  of  its  thought  and  an  unfaltering  strength 
in  utterance.  But  it  is  in  the  moments,  all  too  rare,  of 
simplicity  without  artifice,  that  we  recognise  the  true 
poet  repressed  by  Johnson's  wide  learning  and  the  critical 


178       IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

instinct  fostered  by  his  erudition.  '  The  Precept  of 
Silence,'  a  short  and  faultlessly  beautiful  poem,  is  the 
best  example  he  has  left  of  spontaneous  and  emotional 
poetry. 

"  I  know  you  :  solitary  griefs, 

Desolate  passions,  aching  hours  ! 
I  know  you  :  tremulous  beliefs, 

Agonised  hopes,  and  ashen  flowers  ! 

The  winds  are  sometimes  sad  to  me ; 

The  starry  spaces  full  of  fear  : 
Mine  is  the  sorrow  on  the  sea, 

And  mine  the  sigh  of  places  drear. 

Some  players  upon  plaintive  strings 

Publish  their  wistfulness  abroad  : 
I  have  not  spoken  of  these  things, 

Save  to  one  man  and  unto  God." 

But  Johnson  rarely  wrote  as  simply  as  this.  His  poetry 
reveals  a  mind  secluded,  sensitive,  fine,  loving  the  beautiful 
things  that  are  not  of  a  day  but  for  all  time,  rather  than 
the  genius  of  the  born  poet.  His  real  power  is  better 
seen  in  that  admirable  study,  The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy 
(1894),  and  the  miscellaneous  critical  essays  published 
under  the  title  of  Post  Liminium  (1911). 

Synge  was  not  only  the  greatest  dramatist  of  the  Irish 
Theatre,   but   one   of  the   greatest   dramatists   who   has 

written  in  English.  His  poetry  was 
John  Millington  a  minor  occupation  with  him  and  does 
Synge,  1871-1909.  not  call  for  much  comment.  It  was 

his  belief  that  most  modern  poetry  had 
withdrawn  itself  from  human  and  ordinary  things  and 
that  "  before  verse  can  be  human  again  it  must  learn 
to  be  brutal."  To  begin  with  a  theory  of  life  and 
poetry  is  not  often  a  happy  event ;  but  only  one  or 
two  of  Synge' s  poems  can  be  regarded  as  pattern 
pieces.  '  The  'Mergency  Man '  and  '  Danny,'  as  exercises 
upon  the  theory  are  so  far  interesting,  and  the  best  in 
verse  that  Synge  has  left  behind  him.  Of  interest  also 
as  experiments  are  his  translations  from  Petrarch  and 
Villon  into  the  prose  idiom  of  his  dramas.  But  Synge, 
the  poet,  contains  no  suggestion  of  the  real  greatness  of 
the  man. 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  179 

Of  Mr.  Padraic  Colum  it  may  also  be  said  that  in 
dramatic  writing  he  has  been  able  to  express  himself 

more  fully  than  in  verse.  A  few  of 
Padraic  Colum.  his  poems  appeared  in  New  Songs  (1904), 

an  anthology  from  younger  Irish  poets 
selected  by  A.  E.,  and  in  1907  he  published  Wild  Earth, 
a  separate  volume  of  verse.  Not  all  the  poems  of  this 
volume  flow  simply  and  naturally,  and  some  are  of  the 
order  of  made  poetry.  His  talent  is  chiefly  lyrical,  but 
Mr.  Padraic  Colum  is  ambitious,  and  he  attempts  in  one 
of  his  finest  poems  4  The  Plougher,'  the  manner  of  the 
greater  ode. 

"  Slowly   the   darkness   falls,   the   broken    lands   blend   with   the 

savage ; 
The  brute-tamer  stands  by  the  brutes,  a  head's  breadth   only 

above  them, 
A  head's  breadth?     Ay,  but  therein  is  hell's  depth  and  the 

height  up  to  heaven, 
And  the  thrones  of  the  gods   and   their   halls,   their  chariots, 

purples  and  splendours." 

This  is  not  only  one  of  his  most  ambitious,  but  also  one 
of  his  most  successful  poems.  For  the  most  part  he  is 
content  to  write  more  simply  of  the  joy  of  life  and  earth, 
or  with  pain  and  sadness,  as  in  that  pathetic  little  descrip- 
tion, in  '  An  Old  Woman  of  the  Roads,'  of  the  wandering 
beggar  woman  who  yearns  wistfully  for  her  own  cottage 
with  its  bed,  its  clock,  its  "  shining  delph  "  and  warm 
hearthside.  For  Mr.  Colum  has  a  fine  gift  of  description 
in  a  few  apt  words.  Without  the  expenditure  of  a  single 
unnecessary  word  '  Across  the  Door  '  paints  the  whole 
scene  of  a  dance  and  a  kiss  in  the  dark  night. 

Finer  work  and  greater  promise  may  be  found  in  Mr. 
James  Stephens'  Insurrections  (1909)  and  The  Hill  of 

Vision  (1912).  The  poems  contained 
James  Stephens,  in  these  volumes  scarcely  at  all  reflect 
b.  1882.  the  ideals  of  younger  Irish  writers,  for 

Mr.  Stephens  is  the  individual  rebel 
who  comes  out  against  the  thrones,  dominations  and 
powers  of  the  universe,  not  as  an  affectation,  but  because 
he  is  young  and  dissatisfied  with  a  world  that  does  not 
reach  his  expectations.  The  verses  of  Insurrections  are 


180       IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  n 

nearer  to  the  more  crude  and  vigorous  poems  of  Synge 
than  to  the  work  of  other  poets  in  the  Irish  group.  But, 
as  a  poet,  Mr.  Stephens  has  a  higher  gift  than  Synge. 
In  '  The  Chill  of  Eve  '  he  can  write  a  merely  pretty  and 
conventional  piece,  but  it  is  refreshing,  in  the  wastes  of 
minor  verse  of  our  day,  to  come  upon  poems  like  '  The 
Street  behind  Yours,'  '  Fifty  Pounds  a  Year  and  a  Pension  ' 
or  '  Where  the  Demons  Grin,'  in  which  Mr.  Stephens  is 
discontented.  In  these,  and  in  the  first  volume  in  general, 
there  are  traces  of  the  influence  of  Browning  and  the 
Wessex  Poems  of  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  but  little  enough 
of  the  Irish  literary  movement,  unless  it  be  Synge.  Mr. 
Stephens  seeks  no  graces,  nor  is  slang  abomination  to 
him,  but  he  nearly  always  expresses  something  and 
expresses  it  vigorously.  In  '  The  Optimist '  he  interprets 
afresh  the  old  invitation,  "  All  ye  that  labour,  come  to 
me,  and  rest,"  and  in  itself  it  offers  a  summary  of  the 
philosophy  contained  in  these  poems. 

"  Let  ye  be  still,  ye  tortured  ones,  nor  strive 
Where  striving's  futile.     Ye  can  ne'er  attain 
To  lay  your  burdens  down.     All  things  alive 
Must  bear  the  woes  of  life,  and  if  the  pain 
Be  more  than  ye  can  bear,  then  ye  must  die." 

Mr.  Stephens  is  neither  pessimist  nor  despondent 
weakling.  He  has  looked  at  the  worst  and  gladly  remains 
an  optimist.  The  long  ode,  '  A  Prelude  and  a  Song,' 
with  which  his  second  volume  opens,  is  animated  by  a 
confident  joy  in  living.  It  is  a  fine  and  imaginative  piece 
of  writing,  moving  in  clear  and  continuous,  if  irregular 
rhythms.  Admirable  also  are  some  of  the  short  poems 
descriptive  of  Irish  character  ;  and  especially  apt  and 
vigorous  among  pieces  of  this  kind  is  '  Danny  Murphy.' 
And  almost  perfect  in  simplicity  of  thought,  restraint 
and  frankness  is  '  Afterwards  ' — the  newly  wed  wife's 
lament  for  lost  maidenhood.  Mr.  Stephens  is  a  young 
poet  who  comes  with  the  promise  of  still  better  things. 
To  the  gift  of  vigour  he  adds  a  vivid,  daring  and  singularly 
original  imaginative  faculty,  reflected  in  an  almost  equal 
degree  in  his  verse  and  in  his  unique  prose  book,  The 
Crock  of  Gold. 

Other  Irish  poets  of  to-day  can  hardly  be  named  save 


CHAP,  n]  IRISH  POETS  181 

with  even  greater  brevity,  for  they  may  be  regardedjas 
deriving  from  the  literary  enthusiasm  of  Dublin  in  recent 
years,  and  their  work  shows  less  trace  of  clear  and  definite 
individuality.  '  John  Eglinton  '  (Mr.  W.  K.  Magee)  and 
Mr.  Charles  Weekes  are  mystic  poets  in  the  following  of 
A.  E.  and  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  Mr.  James  H.  Cousins  is  a 
prolific  writer,  and  has,  at  least,  half  a  dozen  volumes 
of  verse  to  his  credit  besides  textbooks  for  schools.  His 
sonnets  and  other  poems  in  various  metres  have  the  merit 
of  simplicity.  But  his  verse  has  no  magic  and  little 
music,  and  is  the  fruit  oi'  good  literary  intention  rather 
than  talent.  Mr.  Thomas  Keohler  is  the  author  of  verse 
in  the  anthology,  New  Songs,  and  he  has  also  printed 
the  Songs  of  a  Devotee  (1906),  a  title  which  indicates  the 
pietistic  mood  of  his  writing.  Dr.  George  Sigerson  and 
Seumas  MacCathmhaoil  may  also  be  mentioned  with  the 
lesser  Irish  poets.  On  the  other  hand,  save  for  a  few 
poems  we  should  scarcely  suspect  Mr.  Seumas  O'Sullivan 
of  writing  from  Ireland.  His  inspiration  springs  from  a 
knowledge  of  good  literature ;  his  verse,  pensive  and 
brooding  without  being  weak  or  dilettante,  is  sustained 
by  careful  craftsmanship  ;  and  his  poems  reflect  a  thought- 
ful and  well-ordered  mind.  Mr.  O'Sullivan  has  no  affecta- 
tion of  startling  originality,  yet  he  is  rarely  wholly  common- 
place. 


CHAPTER  III 

IRISH    POETESSES 

Jane  Barlow — '  Moira  O'Neill ' — Eva  Gore-Booth — Alice  Milligan — Ella 
Young — Nora  Hopper — Katharine  Tynan — Dora  Sigerson  Shorter. 

IN  latter  years  Ireland  has  given  birth  to  a  larger  number 
than  England  of  women  who  reach  a  creditable  level  of 
poetic  attainment,  although,  with  one  or  two  exceptions, 
the  prevalence  of  effusive  sentiment  and  carelessly  fluent 
versification  is  a  shortcoming  characteristic  of  the  Irish 
poetesses.  In  the  case  of  those  who  have  fallen  under 
the  spell  of  the  modern  Irish  school  of  writers  the  influence 
is  little  more  than  superficial  and  scarcely  serves  to  bring 
them  within  the  main  current  of  a  national  conscious- 
ness. The  Irish  in  everyday  life  are  as  practical  a  people 
as  any  in  the  British  Isles.  Dublin  is  a  city  wholly  given 
over  to  practical  affairs,  government,  social  functions, 
politics,  active  commerce  and  academic  education.  The 
very  religion  of  Ireland  is  immeasurably  more  definite 
and  clear  than  that  bewildered  phantasmagoria  of  ideas 
which  does  service  for  religion  in  the  mind  of  most  English- 
men. The  battle  of  a  hundred  sects  has  convinced  the 
English  that  religion  is  an  indefinite  quantity  and  uncer- 
tain in  notation  :  real  Ireland  is  the  home  of  one  dogmatic 
and  institutional  religion  with  tenets  unmistakable  to  the 
meanest  intellect.  The  Celtic  and  the  Latin  races  adopt 
an  institutional  view  of  life,  the  Greek  and  Teutonic  an 
indefinite  and  philosophic  ;  and  for  this  reason  the  mystic 
genius  flourishes  among  the  Celts  and  Latins,  because 
the  background  of  life  is  for  them  immovably  fixed  and 
secure.  Mysticism  is  the  child  of  rigid  and  unbending 
dogma.  In  the  atmosphere  of  Catholicism  or  Calvinism 
mystics  have  been  born  and  lived  full  of  honours  ;  in 
the  many  Protestant  sects,  where  the  creeds  have  lost 
their  backbone,  mysticism  has  as  consistently  declined. 

183 


184      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PAR*  ir 

For  it  is  only  when  a  man  is  not  in  doubt  about  his  soul 
that  he  can  let  free  his  wayward  dreams  to  rove  :  if  he 
is  uncertain  and  tries  to  understand  his  universe  by  pro- 
cesses of  ratiocination  he  is  without  the  happy  confidence 
needful  to  the  mystic.  The  Celt  is  practical  by  instinct 
and  begins  by  making  sure  of  the  immortalities,  and  he 
is  therefore  free  to  be  a  dreamer  and  an  artist ;  the 
Teuton,  never  wholly  convinced  of  the  unseen,  resolves 
his  dreams  into  adventurous  action,  and  he  is  therefore 
greater,  even  as  an  artist,  than  the  Celt.  The  Irish  poets 
and  poetesses,  whether  or  not  they  subscribe  to  the  religion 
of  their  country  are  of  it,  and,  with  few  exceptions, 
mystics  and  dreamers. 

And  further  the  Celt,  more  primitive  and  less  sophisti- 
cated than  the  Teuton,  is  enchained  in  imagination  and 
memory  to  the  places  where  he  was  born.  The  Teutonic 
is  one  of  the  newest  of  races  with  but  little  historic  tradi- 
tion rooting  its  homing  instincts  to  small  areas  ;  and 
English  poetry  long  since  began  to  think  imperially. 
Celtic  poetry  clings  to  the  little  margins  of  the  earth. 
And  thus  a  large  part  of  Celtic  and  Irish  poetry  either 
springs  from  impulses  that  are  not  of  the  things  seen  and 
temporal,  or  it  is  inspired  by  a  wistful  love  of  familiar 
hills  and  valleys.  And  these  two  aspects  of  Irish  poetry 
merge  and  flow  into  each  other.  "  Facts,"  wrote  Meredith, 
"  work  on  the  Celtic  mind  in  its  imaginative  exercise  like 
the  flame  of  a  lamp  crossing  the  eyelids  of  a  sleeper." 
In  other  words  the  Irish  imagination  is  moved  by  the 
spirituality  of  life's  external  incident ;  the  temporal 
event  is  of  no  value  save  as  figurative  of  human  emotions, 
pains  and  joys. 

Miss  Jane  Barlow  only  serves  to  illustrate  one  aspect 
of  the  twofold  responsiveness  of  the  Irish  imagination 
when  working  in  poetry.  The  people  and 
Jane  Barlow,  the  soil  of  Ireland  as  they  are  to-day, 
b.  1860.  neither  its  dreams  nor  its  legendary  past, 

are  the  groundwork  of  her  writing.  In 
style  and  approach  to  Irish  life  she  belongs  to  the  older 
convention,  not  to  the  school  of  Mr.  Yeats,  J.  M.  Synge 
and  Lady  Gregory.  She  has  more  affinity  with  Lever, 
Lover  and  Mangan.  In  her  poems  there  is  little  or  nothing 
of  mystic  and  personal  ecstasy,  if  more  truth  and  sin- 


CUAP.  m]  IRISH  POETESSES  185 

cerity  than  in  much  of  the  hot-house  mysticism  of  younger 
Irish  poets  of  to-day.  Although  Miss  Barlow  is  better 
known  as  a  writer  of  short  stories  and  novels  she  has  pub- 
lished in  verse  Bogland  Studies  (1891)  and  The  Mockers 
(1908).  The  first  volume  contains  seven  long  dialect  poems 
written  in  anapaestic  measure.  Throughout  we  are  con- 
scious of  a  scholarly  and  reflective  mind,  which  does  not 
intrude  itself  but  looks  clearly  and  simply  on  life  and  is 
imbued  with  a  genuine  sympathy  for  men  and  women. 
The  volume  of  1908  opens  with  two  poems  written  in  the 
same  metre  and  in  the  same  narrative  manner,  and 
includes  furthermore  poems  of  a  more  purely  lyrical 
character.  Sometimes  in  shorter  poems,  like  the  sonnet, 
'  A  Last  Lesson,'  or  in  the  elegiac  '  On  Lisnadara,'  Miss 
Barlow  can  write  poetry  that  is  uncommon  and  dis- 
tinctive ;  but  she  is  in  the  greater  part  of  her  verse- 
writing  a  literary  poet  and  not  a  poet  of  inspiration. 
What  she  has  to  tell  in  verse  could,  as  a  rule,  be  told  as 
well  or  better  in  prose  ;  but  her  narrative  poems  are 
tuneful,  they  have  energy  and  movement,  and  there  is 
never  any  smallness  in  her  writing.  She  knows  how  to 
touch  the  humour  and  pathos  of  everyday  life  without 
sentimentalism,  and  life's  nobler  implications  are  always 
present  to  her  thought. 

Moira  O'Neill's  (Mrs.  Skrine)  lyric  poems  of  Irish 
peasant  life  are  of  a  different  and  far  higher  order.  She 
is  remembered  by  a  slender  volume, 
Moira  O'Neill.  Songs  of  the  Glens  of  Antrim  (1900),  con- 
taining twenty-five  short  poems  written 
in  the  dialect  of  the  Antrim  glens.  Moira  O'Neill's  heart 
was  with  men  and  women  of  the  soil ;  if  she  sings  of 
nature  it  is  of  nature  seen  through  the  unsophisticated 
vision  of  the  peasant.  For  objective  or  metaphysical 
abstractions  she  cares  little.  These  poems  are  at  once 
dramatic  in  their  representation  of  differing  types  of 
peasant  life  and  intensely  subjective.  They  are  some- 
times gay  with  a  note  of  "  divilment,"  but  melancholy 
is  never  far  absent.  When  not  remotely  spiritual  Irish 
poetry  reflects  drink,  sport  and  boisterous  diversions  or 
the  sadness  ol  an  oppressed  and  struggling  race.  Lever 
and  Lover  have  long  been  dead,  and  the  world  only 
sings  drinking-songs  as  at  a  religious  function  in  which 


186     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  ii 

it  has  ceased  to  believe.  And  Irish  poetry  has  the  melan- 
choly of  modern  disillusion.  Moira  O'Neill's  songs  are 
poems  of  exile,  regret  or  longing,  expressed  in  the  speech 
and  with  the  thought  of  the  simple  folk  of  the  land,  but  of 
a  Celtic  people  who  naturally  utter  their  thoughts  to  the 
accompaniment  of  poetical  imagery  and  see  the  common 
events  of  their  rough  lives  in  the  light  of  a  poetical  vision. 
The  beautiful  '  Corrymeela,'  the  plaint  of  an  Irish  har- 
vester in  England,  is  now  well  known,  and  hardly  less 
simple  and  true  in  humanity  and  pathos  are  '  The  Boy 
from  Ballytearm '  and  '  A  Song  of  Glennan.'  In  the 
poetry  of  A.  E.  the  love  of  Irish  soil  is  a  spiritual  exalta- 
tion, a  strong  fervour,  with  Moira  O'Neill  it  is  a  pensive 
and  wistful  mood.  In  '  A  Song  of  Glennan  '  the  labourer 
torn  from  his  native  place  utters  his  thoughts  and  regrets  : 

"  But  since  we  come  away  from  there 

An'  far  across  the  say, 
I  still  have  wrought  an'  still  have  thought 
The  way  I'm  doin'  the  day. 

An'  now  we're  quarely  better  fixed, 

In  troth  !  there's  nothin'  wrong  : 
But  me  an'  mine,  by  rain  an'  shine 

We  do  be  thinkin'  long." 

The  utter  simplicity  of  the  words  and  thoughts  touch  the 
very  heart  of  human  regret  as  surely  as  does  Swinburne 
in  his  '  Jacobite  Exile.'  And  the  psychological  truthful- 
ness of  the  poem  is  noteworthy.  In  the  home  glens  of 
Antrim  the  peasant  accepted  unthinkingly  the  accidents 
of  his  life — 

"  The  weary  wind  might  take  the  roof, 

The  rain  might  lay  the  corn ; 
We'd  up  and  look  for  better  luck 

About  the  morrow's  morn." 

But  across  the  sea  in  a  strange  land  he  meets  and  suc- 
cumbs to  the  spirit  of  the  modern  world — the  questioning 
mood. 

In  recent  years  Ireland  has  produced  no  singer  of  the 
simple  life  of  the  people  gifted  with  so  rare  and  fine  a 
genius  as  Moira  O'Neill.  By  virtue  of  the  simple  dignity 
and  strength  of  her  art  she  takes  her  place  but  little 


CHAP,  in]  IRISH  POETESSES  187 

below  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  and  A.  E.,  the  two  chief  poets  of 
the  Irish  literary  group.  Her  lyrics  are  the  product  of 
unforced  poetic  genius  ;  her  gaiety,  her  melancholy  and 
sense  of  tragedy  are  entirely  inevitable  and  natural ; 
and  she  has  a  happy  gift  of  individualising  character  in 
song.  She  has  also  written  a  novel,  An  Easter  Vacation 
(1893),  and  a  shorter  tale,  The  Elf -errant  (1895),  but  it  is 
by  her  poetry  that  she  is  and  will  be  remembered. 

No  poetess  has  reflected  more  beautifully  than  Moira 
O'Neill  the  love  of  Irish  soil;  no  Irish  poetess  pos- 
sesses in  equal  measure  with  Miss 
Eva  Gore-Booth.  Eva  Gore-Booth  the  genius  of  mystic 
knowledge  and  insight.  The  first  volume 
of  Poems  (1898)  revealed  scarcely  anything  of  her  real 
power.  As  a  metrist  she  wrote  without  difficulty  or 
effort,  but  beyond  a  slight  tendency  to  wistfulness  and 
melancholy  there  was  nothing  to  mark  the  Celtic  strain 
in  her  work.  On  the  other  hand  some  of  these  poems 
are  incisive,  even  realistic  and  satirical.  One  poem, 
'  Finger  Posts,'  reveals  the  deep-seated  mysticism  of 
Miss  Gore-Booth's  mind.  And  the  common  and  prevail- 
ing characteristic  of  all  her  later  volumes,  including 
the  poetic  drama  of  The  Sorrowful  Princess  (1907),  is 
a  mystic  vision  of  life's  spiritual  significance.  This  is 
most  clearly  seen  in  her  second,  and  still  the  best  of 
her  volumes,  The  One  and  the  Many  (1904),  in  which 
under  differing  aspects  and  in  separate  sequences  of  poems 
the  resolution  of  life's  incongruities  is  found  in  the  one 
dream  and  hope.  The  thought  of  this  volume  is  quickened 
with  a  mystical  and  optimistic  faith.  Neither  as  a 
poetess  nor  as  a  mystic  does  Miss  Gore-Booth  lean  only 
upon  her  emotions,  trusting  to  the  heart  divorced  from 
the  intellect,  like  many  of  her  Irish  sisters.  She  is  a 
student :  her  poems  reflect  the  thought  of  Porphyry, 
Heraclitus,  Plato,  Plotinus,  Paracelsus.  She  does  not, 
like  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  nourish  her  soul  chiefly  on  the 
spiritual  heritage  of  the  Irish  race.  She  goes  far  afield  ; 
and  her  poems  reflect  a  mind  which  has  made  the  mysticism 
of  the  world  a  living  part  of  its  imaginative  faculty.  The 
influence  of  the  Irish  literary  movement  and  the  legendary 
tales  of  Ireland  is  traceable  in  the  dramatic  poems, 
Unseen  Kings  (1904)  and  The  Triumph  of  Mceve  (1905) ; 


188     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

and  among  shorter  lyrics  the  exquisite  '  Little  Waves  of 
Breffny,'  owes  its  inspiration  to  the  love  of  Ireland ; 
but  it  is  in  her  mystical  volumes,  in  The  One  and  the 
Many  and  the  shorter  poems  of  The  Three  Resurrections 
(1905),  that  Miss  Gore-Booth  most  surely  finds  her  voice. 
There  is  no  suspicion  of  a  desire  to  shirk  reality  nor  any 
suggestion  of  intellectual  weakness  in  her  thought, 
mystical  and  obscure  as  it  may  seem  to  many  readers. 
Furthermore,  the  technical  quality  of  her  poetry  is  admir- 
able, and  she  writes  with  an  inborn  gift  for  choosing  the 
perfect  phrase.  The  wistful  love  of  homeland  and  the 
dreamy  spirituality  of  the  Celt  are  severally  illustrated 
in  the  poetry  of  Moira  O'Neill  and  Miss  Eva  Gore-Booth 
with  greater  power  and  beauty  than  in  any  other  Irish 
poetesses  of  to-day. 

Miss  Alice  Milligan  and  Miss  Ella  Young  are  also 
poetesses  to  be  counted  with  the  rank  and  file  of  the 
Irish  literary  renascence.  Miss  Milligan' s 
Alice  Milligan.  poems,  contained  in  Hero  Lays  (1908), 
are  often  of  a  ringing  and  patriotic  char- 
acter. She  writes  in  long  lines  and  with  an  easy  rhythm 
more  reminiscent  of  masculine  than  feminine  workman- 
ship. '  The  Lament  of  the  Dark  Daughter  '  and  '  The 
Defenders  of  the  Ford  '  are  strong  and  vigorous  lays. 
Miss  Milligan  always  writes  with  fervour  :  nearly  every 
poem  is  inspired  by  a  passionate  love  of  Ireland.  In  the 
matter  of  rhyming  and  metre  she  can  be  careless,  her 
writing  lacks  any  strong  and  distinctive  individuality, 
but  she  is  more  than  the  mere  versifier. 

Miss  Ella  Young  has  published  a  few  verses  in  the 
anthology,  New  Songs,  and  in  Poems  (1906), 

a    .f1"18'  verses    that   have   a  tender   gracefulness, 

but  are  in  no  wise  remarkable. 

The   Irish   element   in   the   writing   of  Nora   Hopper, 
Katharine    Tynan    and    Mrs.    Dora    Sigerson    Shorter    is 
accidental     rather    than     considered    and 
Nora  Hopper,       deliberate.    The  group  consciousness,  when 
1871-1906.          it  passes  beyond  the  limits  of  family,  is 
less    likely   to    kindle   the    imagination   of 
women  than  men,  and  the  spirit  of  a  national  movement 
in  Irish  literature  has  only  touched  women  writers  fit- 
fully.    Save  for  a  strain  of  Celtic  sentimentality  and  the 


CHAP,  m]  IRISH  POETESSES  189 

occasional  use  of  a  Hibernian  setting  or  dialect  there  is 
little  distinctive  of  race  in  the  volumes  of  the  three 
poetesses  just  named.  Nora  Hopper  (Mrs.  Wilfrid  Hugh 
Chesson)  the  most  abundantly  endowed  with  poetic 
genius  of  the  three,  writes  with  truer  inspiration  of  classic 
theme  than  of  Irish  life.  In  her  first  volume,  Ballads  in 
Prose  (1894),  consisting  of  Irish  folk-stories  rendered  into 
English  prose,  the  chief  note  is  Celtic,  but  in  her  verse 
she  is  more  influenced  by  classic  myth  and  English 
lyrical  song.  Many  poems  in  her  first  volume  of  verse, 
Under  Quicken  Boughs  (1896),  relate  to  Ireland  and  its 
people  ;  but  it  is  in  poems  of  another  order,  in  '  Phaeacia  ' 
and  the  truly  beautiful  and  musical  '  Nymph's  Lament ' 
that  she  attains  to  her  best.  A  few  lines  from  the  latter 
will  illustrate  Nora  Hopper's  power,  though  it  is  to  be 
confessed  she  seldom  wrote  so  well  : 

"  O,  Sister  Nymphs,  how  shall  we  dance  or  sing 

Remembering 

What  was  and  is  not  ?     How  sing  any  more 
Now  Aphrodite's  rosy  reign  is  o'er  ? 

For  on  the  forest-floor 
Our  feet  fall  wearily  the  summer  long, 

The  whole  year  long : 

No  sudden  Goddess  through  the  rushes  glides, 
No  eager  God  among  the  laurels  hides  ; 
Jove's  eagle  mopes  beside  an  empty  throne, 
Persephone  and  Ades  sit  alone 

By  Lethe's  hollow  shore." 

Songs  of  the  Morning  (1900)  and  Aquamarines  (1902) 
contain  nothing  on  the  same  plane.  The  thought  is  more 
conventional,  her  imagination  is  weaker,  and  Nora 
Hopper's  taste  has  not  improved.  '  A  Woman's  Marriage 
Song  '  is  almost  foolishly  mawkish.  Although  she  can 
write  in  the  stronger  manner  of  the  earlier  volume  in 
'  A  Pagan,'  '  Ulfhada  '  and  '  The  Seaweed-Gatherers,' 
there  is  not  much  to  distinguish  these  volumes  from  the 
great  mass  of  miscellaneous  verse  which  continually  pours 
from  the  press. 

Mrs.  Chesson  always  wrote  with  grace,  in  that  manner 
which  may  be  described  as  refined,  and  her  verse  was 
nearly  always  melodious.  But,  as  is  the  case  with 
Katharine  Tynan,  the  flow  of  verse  is  too  easy  ;  there 


190     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

is  a  treacherous  facility  in  the  expression  of  little  thoughts, 
little  impressions  and  superficial  emotions.  She  rarely 
calls  for  intellectual  alertness  in  the  reader,  she  scarcely 
ever  surprises  with  the  unexpected,  and,  in  equivalence, 
she  does  not  often  sink  beneath  the  level  of  moderate 
commendation.  Under  Quicken  Boughs  is  her  one  dis- 
tinctive volume,  containing  poetry  of  a  nobler  and  more 
imaginative  order. 

Katharine  Tynan  (Mrs.  Hinkson)  is  never  possessed  by 
the    moods    of    stronger    inspiration    which    occasionally 

visited  Nora  Hopper.  Her  earliest 
Katharine  Tynan,  volumes,  Louise  de  V oilier e  (1885), 
b.  1861.  Shamrocks  (1887)  and  Ballads  and 

Lyrics  (1891)  are  disfigured  by  many 
lapses  in  taste  and  style.  The  rhymes — "  sweeter, 
glitter,  palace,  trellis,  sward,  herd  "  — are  often  inexcus- 
able ;  and  she  is  sometimes  guilty  of  cacophonies  in  music 
and  rhythm  which  go  far  to  ruin  a  whole  poem.  4  Rosa 
Spinosa,'  for  example,  both  in  content  and  form  rises 
above  the  standard  of  her  earlier  work,  but  she  damages 
it  irretrievably  with  the  jangle  of  the  closing  couplet — 

"  Little  rose  of  thorns,  come  close 
To  the  heart  you  stab  so,  Rose  !  " 

Many  of  her  poems  are  songs  of  childhood  and  children, 
pretty  and  graceful,  but  not  rising  above  the  common- 
place in  thought  or  descriptive  power.  The  Cuckoo  Songs 
of  1894  showed,  however,  a  distinct  advance  upon  the 
work  of  the  earlier  volumes.  Especially  beautiful  in  this 
volume  is  '  The  Sad  Mother,'  which  rises  above  Mrs. 
Hinkson' s  graceful  sentimentality  to  a  note  of  tragic 
pathos  which  is  true  and  deep.  And  in  some  of  the 
dialect  poems,  notably  in  '  The  Train  that  goes  to  Ireland,' 
in  New  Poems  (1911),  she  reaches  a  higher  level  than  her 
ordinary  manner.  But  there  is  little,  in  general,  to  dis- 
tinguish from  each  other  the  many  volumes  of  verse  she 
has  published.  The  garden  in  spring  and  winter,  the 
birds  chirruping,  the  love  of  children,  pieties  and  religious 
observances,  these  form  the  staple  of  Katharine  Tynan's 
verse.  There  is  seldom  any  strong  emotion  in  thought 
nor  originality  in  phrase,  nor,  again,  is  she  the  possessor 
of  any  personality  in  style.  And  with  little  modification 


CHAP,  m]  IRISH  POETESSES  191 

these  observations  apply  with  equal  relevance  to  the  poetry 
of  Dora  Sigerson  (Mrs.  Clement  Shorter). 

Mrs.  Shorter' s  poetry  is  Celtic  not  only  in  its  moods 
of  melancholy  and  joyous  faith,  in  its  wistful  tenderness, 
but  in  the  incoherence  and  formless- 
Dora  Sigerson  ness  which  attach  to  the  work  of  the 
Shorter.  purely  romantic  writer.  She,  like 

Katherine  Tynan  and  Nora  Hopper, 
had  a  ready  gift  of  slender  song,  but  of  intellectual  power 
there  is  little  evidence  and  her  judgment  was  untrust- 
worthy. Although  she  was  not  ungifted  with  that  power 
of  conciseness  which  belongs  by  right  to  the  ballad  form, 
she  was  often  carelessly  prolix  and  indefinite.  Nor  had 
she  any  marked  distinction  in  style.  Like  many  of  the 
Irish  poets,  from  the  days  of  Tom  Moore  to  our  own,  she 
wrote  English  as  a  language  partly  foreign  to  the  pro- 
cesses of  her  thought.  Subconsciously  she  thought  in 
another  grammar,  and  her  lapses  could  be  surprising. 
Further  her  ear  was  curiously  defective.  She  sometimes 
failed  to  note  when  she  passed  from  one  metre  into  another  ; 
and  even  in  writing  common  measure  she  could  break 
down,  as  the  ballad  of  '  Earl  Roderick's  Bride '  will 
illustrate.  Only  too  often  she  suggests  a  snatching  at 
the  first  phrases  that  came  to  mind,  heedless  of  rhythms 
and  even  sequence  of  thought.  Her  poetry  is  a  poetry 
of  the  emotions  in  which  the  intellect  plays  little  part. 

Her  most  characteristic  work  lies  in  the  ballad  form, 
and  if  Meredith  be  right  in  asserting  that  the  main  point 
of  a  ballad  is  "to  tell  a  story  metrically,"  we  need  feel 
less  distress  with  Mrs.  Shorter' s  habitual  faults  than  we 
should  in  lyric  and  dramatic  poetry.  For  Mrs.  Shorter 
wrote  many  ballads  which  manifest  a  faculty  for  sym- 
pathy not  only  with  life's  emotions  and  passions,  but 
with  its  activities  and  heroic  deeds,  and  in  all  there 
is  present  that  consciousness  of  communion  with  the 
unseen  world  so  distinctive  of  the  Celtic  temperament. 
In  1907  the  five  volumes  of  verse  she  had  already  pub- 
lished were  gathered  in  Collected  Poems  :  in  1910  another 
substantial  volume,  The  Troubadour  and  Other  Poems, 
appeared,  and  in  1912  New  Poems.  Among  the  lyrics 
of  these  volumes  '  Distant  Voices,'  '  A  Vagrant  Heart,' 
'  The  Gypsies'  Road  '  and  the  charming  '  Wind  on  the 


192      IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PAKT  n 

Hills  '  may  be  named.  In  these  and  other  lyrics  a  wist- 
fulness  of  unrest  and  a  love  of  fatherland  are  the  prevail- 
ing themes.  But  it  was  when  she  wrote  of  action,  of  pathos 
and  tragedy  in  life,  in  such  poems  as  '  The  Guardian 
Angels,'  '  The  Six  Sorrows,'  '  Jeanne  Bras  '  and  '  A  Ballad 
of  Marjorie  '  that  Mrs.  Shorter  was  at  her  best.  In  '  A 
Ballad  of  Marjorie  '  she  reached  kinship  with  the  imper- 
sonal and  moving  pathos  of  old  folk-song,  while  '  The 
Man  who  Trod  on  Sleeping  Grass  '  is  a  beautiful  ballad 
in  a  more  modern  manner.  If  the  greater  part  of  Mrs. 
Shorter' s  writing  does  not  reach  a  high  standard  in  dis- 
tinction of  content  and  individuality  of  style,  a  few  of 
her  ballads  and  one  or  two  of  her  lyrics  are  not  easily 
to  be  forgotten.  Her  verse  is  never  enhanced  by  those 
sudden  and  illuminating  felicities  of  phrase  and  thought 
which  mark  greater  poetry  and  occasionally  the  work  of 
lesser  poets  ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  she  is  not  frequently 
disconcertingly  empty  of  matter  and  her  sentiment  rarely 
degenerates  to  insipidity. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   IRISH   LITERARY   THEATRE 

THE  importance  of  the  Celtic  Revival  in  Ireland  is  most 
marked  in  the  impulse  it  has  aroused  toward  the  com- 
position of  literary  drama,  a  drama  that  may  not  only 
be  read  with  pleasure  in  the  library  but  be  acted  with 
success  on  the  stage.     If  the  work  of  Synge  alone  be 
taken  into  account,  and  other  Irish  dramatists  forgotten, 
this  statement  still  holds  true.     His  plays,  however,  are 
not  the  only  work  of  new  power  and  beauty  in  this  kind 
which  Dublin  has  sent  out  in  the  last  quarter  of  a  century. 
To  them  must  be  added  the  dramatic  experiments   of 
Mr.  Yeats,  A.  E.,  Dr.  Hyde,  the  dialogues  and  farces  of 
Lady  Gregory,  and  the  prose  plays  of  a  number  of  other 
writers,    including  Mr.   Rutherford   Mayne,   Mr.   Padraic 
Colum,   Mr.    Edward    Martyn,    Mr.   William    Boyle,    Mr. 
Lennox  Robinson,  Mr.  St.  John  Ervine.    In  the  few  years 
that  have  passed  since  an  Irish  theatre  for  Irish  plays 
came  into  being  more  good  work  has  been  done  in  Dublin 
than  in  London  for  the  production  of  a  drama  that  can 
claim  to  be  literature.     There  are  certainly  already  signs 
that  the  stronger  and  more  national  inspiration  is  waning. 
Mr.  Robinson  and  Mr.  Ervine,  for  example,  are  falling 
back  into  the  rut  of  Ibsen,  Hauptmann  and  Galsworthy, 
substituting  for  the  greater  truth  of  poetry  the  make- 
believe  of  photographic  realism.     But  it  would  be  rash 
to  prophesy  that  the  Irish  playwrights  are  unlikely  to 
recover  their  former  freshness  and  individuality.    Perhaps 
Irish  drama  has  only  fallen  upon  its  hobbledehoy  period. 
On  the  other  hand,  like  the  drama  of  the  Elizabethan  age, 
it  may  be  fated  to  nourish  in  full  vigour  for  less  than  a 
generation. 

When  Dublin  began  to  produce  a  school  of  native  play- 
wrights the  time  was  past  by  several  years  since  Ibsen 
had   been   staged   with   comparative   success   in  London 
o  193 


194     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

and  the  battle  fought  on  his  behalf  by  Mr.  Archer  and 
Mr.  Gosse  virtually  won.  In  1893  six  plays  by  Ibsen 
were  produced  in  London,  and  in  the  preceding  year 
Hauptmann's  Die  Weber  appeared  in  Germany.  Haupt- 
mann's  play  was  an  extension  of  Ibsen's  social  drama 
to  sociological  and  economic  study  in  the  method  and 
spirit  of  the  commission  of  inquiry  ;  and  it  provided 
the  pattern  which  has  since  been  followed  by  innumerable 
playwrights  both  in  the  country  of  its  origin  and  in 
England.  The  tide  set  strongly  in  the  direction  of  realistic 
and  intellectual  drama  ;  and,  though  this  form  cannot 
claim  to  have  won  great  popularity,  it  is  the  only  form 
of  drama,  to  speak  in  general  terms,  in  which  work  of 
any  value  or  significance  has  been  done  in  the  past  twenty 
years.  To  Ireland,  however,  may  be  assigned  the  credit 
of  creating  a  drama,  not  cosmopolitan  and  realistic,  but 
national,  poetical  and  humorous,  a  drama  which  without 
pretence  of  the  higher  intellectualism  rendered  faithfully 
the  pains  and  joys  of  simple  men  and  women.  And  it  is 
in  this,  the  reaction,  conscious  or  unconscious,  against 
the  European  dominance  of  Ibsen — that  the  drama  of 
the  Irish  Revival  is  remarkable  and  noteworthy.  For 
the  first  time  in  its  history  Ireland  has  produced  a  drama 
that  is  national,  owing  little  to  extraneous  influences. 
The  plays  of  Sheridan  and  Goldsmith  expressed  nothing 
that  was  exclusively  Irish,  and  the  drama  of  Wilde  in  a 
later  generation  reflects  Paris  and  London.  But  contem- 
porary Irish  dramatists  have  worked  out  their  own 
salvation,  finding  their  sources  not  in  the  printed  drama 
of  other  countries  but  in  the  living  Irishman  on  the  soil 
or  in  the  streets  of  Dublin  and  country  towns.  That 
they  have  wholly  banished  the  memory  of  Ibsen,  Haupt- 
mann  and  Maeterlinck  it  would  be  idle  to  pretend  ;  yet 
in  their  more  individual  work  they  have  succeeded  in 
making  a  new  drama  that  has  a  method  peculiarly  its 
own  in  style  and  in  the  substitution  of  a  poetry  of  human 
passion  in  place  of  objective  and  intellectual  dissection. 

In  the  preface  to  The  Bending  of  the  Bough  Mr.  George 
Moore  supplies,  in  the  mood  of  dogmatic  generalisation 
native  to  his  thought,  an  explanation  of  the  motive  which 
led  to  the  foundation  of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre.  Art, 
we  are  told,  only  flowers  in  the  youth  of  nations,  and 


CHAP,  iv]     THE  IRISH  LITERARY  THEATRE      195 

England  and  London  are  old.  In  London  the  literary 
drama  of  Ibsen  and  Maeterlinck  is  unacceptable,  for  art 
is  not  desired  by  the  theatre-going  public  of  the  great 
city.  Therefore  Irish  dramatists  are  content  to  go  to 
Dublin  to  produce  plays  at  a  slight  loss,  not  for  the  sake 
of  the  public  but  for  the  sake  of  art.  In  the  years  which 
have  followed  this  preface  Mr.  Moore  has  discovered  that 
Dublin  fails  to  respond  whole-heartedly,  and  with  a  readi- 
ness that  shames  London,  to  the  art  of  the  drama.  Dublin, 
like  London,  is  in  part  a  city  of  pleasure,  and  there  as 
elsewhere,  since  Imperial  Rome,  that  section  of  society 
which  has  leisure  and  money  to  amuse  itself  persists  in 
regarding  the  theatre  as  primarily  a  place  of  entertain- 
ment, and  the  populace  still  finds  perennial  joy  in  the 
farce,  the  melodrama  and  the  variety  show.  The  Abbey 
Theatre,  like  the  prophet,  is  not  without  honour  save  in 
its  own  country  ;  and  its  name  is  more  noised  abroad 
in  England  and  America  than  in  the  place  of  its  birth. 
Mr.  Yeats  has  estimated  the  audience  upon  which  the 
Abbey  Theatre  calls  at  four  thousand  young  people  drawn 
from  the  more  intelligent  and  eager  section  of  the  lower 
middle  classes,  who  have  been  gradually  educated  to 
appreciate  not  only  the  national  motif  of  the  new  play- 
wrights but  the  sincerity  of  their  artistic  intention.  The 
founders  of  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre  claim  that  they 
have  been  justified  in  their  aims  by  discovering  a  new 
audience.  The  gallery  of  the  Dublin  Theatre,  it  is  said, 
has  been  known  to  applaud  the  sentiment,  "  At  all  events 
we  have  no  proof  that  spiritual  truths  are  illusory,  whereas 
we  know  that  the  world  is  " — a  sentiment,  it  is  implied, 
that  would  pass  over  the  sophisticated  and  sceptical 
gallery  of  England  without  response. 

The  perfect  graces  of  civilisation  can  only  be  cultivated 
in  small  city-states,  and  the  playwright  of  Dublin  has, 
at  least,  this  advantage  over  his  fellow  of  London,  Berlin 
or  Paris,  that  he  makes  his  first  appeal  to  a  smaller,  a 
more  compact  and  a  more  homogeneous  public.  But  if 
Dublin  is  fortunate  in  lying  removed  from  the  highways 
of  European  commercialism  and  industrialism,  she  is  not 
wholly  at  unity  within  herself.  Dublin  Castle  is  the 
centre  of  foreign  influences  and  ideas  ;  Trinity  College 
has  never  wholly  identified  itself  with  Irish  life ;  and 


196     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

Nationalism  finds  as  little  use  for  art  as  do  political 
movements  in  other  lands.  The  literary,  the  poetic,  the 
artistic  beauty  of  Irish  drama  will  find  its  small  audience 
in  London  and  Chicago  as  well  as  in  Dublin  :  it  is  in  the 
element  of  association  with  the  traditions  and  memories  of 
racial  life  that  the  plays  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  will  find  a 
devotion  in  Dublin  they  cannot  hope  for  elsewhere.  This 
apart,  Irish  drama  is  as  likely  to  find  genuine  apprecia- 
tion, wide  or  narrow,  in  London  as  in  Dublin. 

The  last  century  had  almost  drawn  to  its  close  when 
the  Irish  Literary  Theatre  was  founded,  but  now  it  has 
a  repertory  of  perhaps  not  less  than  a  hundred  plays. 
In  the  initial  stages  of  the  project  Mr.  Yeats  was  sup- 
ported by  Mr.  Martyn  and  Lady  Gregory,  and  later  they 
were  joined  by  Mr.  George  Moore.  In  1899  The  Countess 
Cathleen  by  Mr.  Yeats  and  The  Heather  Field  by  Mr. 
Martyn  were  produced  at  the  Antient  Concert  Rooms, 
Dublin.  In  the  following  year  Mr.  Moore's  Bending  of  the 
Bough  was  staged,  and  in  1901  Dr.  Hyde's  Twisting  of  the 
Rope,  the  first  play  to  be  produced  in  Gaelic.  English 
actors  fetched  from  London  were  first  used  in  these  per- 
formances ;  but  in  1902  they  were  replaced  by  Irish 
players,  who  trained  themselves  in  the  new  drama  by 
acting  in  pieces  by  A.  E.,  Mr.  Yeats,  Lady  Gregory,  Mr. 
Colum  and  Mr.  Cousins.  The  workers  in  the  movement 
formed  themselves  into  the  Irish  National  Theatre 
Society  ;  and  in  1904,  through  the  generosity  of  Miss 
Horniman,  they  were  put  in  possession  of  the  Abbey 
Theatre,  since  then  the  centre  of  Irish  playwriting.  The 
ideals  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  have  begotten  the  work  of  a 
group  of  talented  young  dramatists.  Its  repertory  is  a 
body  of  drama  national  in  temper,  original  in  style, 
inspired  with  poetical  image  and  metaphor,  a  drama 
which  has  no  close  counterpart  in  Europe  to-day.  The 
preservation  of  Irish  nationality  was,  as  Lady  Gregory 
asserts,  the  chief  end  of  the  Gaelic  league.  And  this 
ideal  has  given  also  to  the  Irish  dramatists  what  other- 
wise they  would  not  have  possessed  in  equal  measure. 
It  has  given  to  them,  and  not  only  to  Synge,  of  whom 
Lady  Gregory  uses  the  words,  "  fable,  emotion,  style." 


CHAPTER  V 

THE    IRISH   PLAYWRIGHTS 

W.  B.  Yeats — A.  E. — Edward  Martyn — George  Moore — Lady  Gregory — 
.1.  M.  Synge — William  Boyle — Padraic  Colum — Lennox  Robinson — 
T.  C.  Murray — Rutherford  Mayne — St.  John  Ervine. 

WITHOUT  the  enthusiasm  of  Mr.  Yeats  and  his  chief 
supporter,  Lady  Gregory,  the  Abbey  Theatre  would  never 

have  been  the  magnet  drawing  toward 
William  Butler  itself  so  much  writing  that  was  original 
Yeats,  b.  1865.  in  temper  and  method.  They  have 

not  only  written  for  the  stage  of  that 
theatre,  but  inspired  others  of  a  younger  generation  to 
gather  themselves  into  a  group  of  dramatists  animated 
with  a  national  ideal.  Therefore,  though  Mr.  Yeats  is 
a  lyric  poet  and  not  a  dramatist,  his  prose  dramas  can- 
not be  overlooked.  Verse-drama  is  doubtless  his  ideal, 
and  the  prose-plays  are  probably,  in  part  at  least,  an 
attempt  to  answer  the  demands  of  the  average  audience 
in  Dublin.  Of  the  four  plays  in  prose — Cathleen  ni 
Houlihan  (1903),  A  Pot  of  Broth  (1902),  The  Hour-glass: 
A  Morality  (1903)  and  Where  There  is  Nothing  (1903)— 
the  first-named  is  not  only  dramatically  the  most  success- 
ful but  the  most  distinctively  Irish  in  its  atmosphere. 
The  action  of  the  play  is  placed  at  the  time  of  the  French 
landing  of  1798,  and  Ireland  is  presented  under  the  figure 
of  a  poor  old  woman.  A  lad  who  is  asked  by  cottagers 
if  he  has  seen  her  pass  replies  :  "I  did  not,  but  I  saw  a 
young  girl,  and  she  had  the  walk  of  a  queen."  The  thought 
of  the  play  is  that  which  inspires  the  whole  Irish  move- 
ment— Ireland  is  old  in  history  but  young  in  spirit.  The 
future  is  yet  with  her,  though  strangers  are  in  her  house, 
and  her  "  four  beautiful  green  fields  "  have  been  taken 
away.  The  dialogue  of  this  play  scarcely  springs  from 
the  characters,  but  the  style  has  a  charm  in  its  entire 
simplicity.  And  this  alone  relieves  the  obtrusive  didacti- 

197 


198     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

cism  of  the  piece  and  shelters  the  allegorical  intention 
which  is  thrust  to  the  foreground. 

A  Pot  of  Broth  is  merely  slight  farce,  written  in  a  spirit 
different  to  anything  else  from  Mr.  Yeats'  pen. 

Of  a  different  character  again  are  The  Hour-glass,  which 
shows  the  wisdom  of  the  Fool  who  believes  in  the  invisible 
world  and  the  folly  of  the  Wise  Man  who  believes  only  in 
that  which  may  be  seen  and  handled,  and  his  longest 
dramatic  writing,  Where  There  is  Nothing,  an  extra- 
ordinary medley  representing  chiefly  the  religious  ecstasies 
and  desire  of  union  with  the  infinite  of  a  man  in  the 
modern  world  disillusioned  with  the  conventional  and 
unintelligent  materialism  of  the  age.  The  world  of  spiritual 
vision,  in  which  the  soul  has  communion  with  dreams 
transcending  the  harsh  reality  of  common  life,  is  Mr. 
Yeats'  haven  of  refuge  from  "  fanciless  fact " ;  and  there- 
fore he  has  given  what  there  is  in  him  to  give  chiefly  in 
mystical  lyrics.  In  writing  for  the  stage  he  has  been 
most  successful  when  he  wrought  out  in  verse  the  dim 
legends  of  Ireland's  heroic  past.  And  the  strength  of  his 
verse-plays  is  in  their  poetry,  not  their  action.  That 
drama  may  be  romantic  Shakespeare  has  abundantly 
proved,  but  it  may  be  doubted  whether  lasting  drama 
can  ever  be  written  save  by  the  writer  who  finds  no 
strangeness  in  contact  with  human  nature  in  the  rough. 
And  in  this  faculty  Mr.  Yeats  is  weak.  Whatever  slight 
element  of  it  we  find  in  his  plays  may  be  attributed  to  the 
influence  of  Lady  Gregory.  His  journeyings  to  gather 
folk-lore  and  song  from  the  peasantry  of  Sligo  have  not 
given  him  that  friendly  companionship  with  the  common 
people,  that  knowledge  of  their  thought,  speech  and 
humour  which  lend  truth,  vigour,  raciness  to  the  dialogue 
of  Synge,  Lady  Gregory  and  Mr.  Padraic  Colum.  Songs 
and  legendary  tales  have  been  to  Mr.  Yeats  literary 
material,  absorbed  and  transfigured  in  reproduction  by 
the  workings  of  an  individual  and  differentiated  imagina- 
tion. Cathleen  ni  Houlihan,  the  best  of  the  prose  plays, 
is  patently  allegorical  ;  and  the  others  are  of  interest, 
not  as  drama,  but  as  additional  illustrations  of  the  mood 
and  thought  of  the  contemporary  Celtic  Revival  in  its 
contact  with  the  bare  and  circumstantial  detail  of  the 
modern  world. 


CHAP,  v]       THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  199 

And  with  but  little  change  these  comments  apply  to 

the  venture  in  drama  of  Mr.  Yeats'  fellow-poet,  A.  E., 

Deirdre    (1902),    which,    conceived    and 

A.  E.,  George  W.     written  rapidly,  is  the  work  of  a  lyric 

Russell,  b.  1867.      and  mystical  poet.     It  is  one  outcome 

of  the    Irish   Literary    Theatre,    but   it 

can  take  no  place  in  the  drama  of  value  produced  by  the 

movement. 

Among  those  who  wrote  plays  for  the  new  theatre  in 
its  tentative  beginnings  the  names  of  Mr.  Edward  Martyn 
and   Mr.   George   Moore   are   of  greater 
Edward  Martyn,      importance.      Mr.    Martyn    was    one    of 
b.  1859.  the  first  to  be  drawn  into  the  move- 

ment, and  one  of  the  first  to  fall  away 
gradually  after  his  play,  A  Tale  of  a  Town  (1902),  had 
been  refused.  Although  he  possesses  fertility  of  ideas  Mr. 
Martyn  has  not  always  been  able  to  use  his  gift  with 
dramatic  effect ;  and,  like  Mr.  Moore,  he  is  by  tempera- 
ment and  experience  out  of  touch  with  the  romance, 
poetry  and  mysticism,  peasant  humour  and  peasant 
speech,  which  are  the  ground  of  the  folk-play  the  Irish 
Theatre  set  itself  to  produce.  He  is  more  at  home  in 
representing  the  educated  and  middle  classes  of  Ireland, 
and,  in  consequence,  his  work  is  less  distinctively  national. 
Nevertheless  The  Heather  Field  (1899),  one  of  the  first 
plays  produced  in  Dublin  under  the  auspices  of  the  new 
movement,  was  a  popular  success.  The  theme — the  con- 
trast between  harsh  fact  and  Celtic  idealism — is  elucidated 
in  the  story  of  the  Irish  landlord  who  sacrifices  his  all 
and  sinks  into  madness  in  the  vain  attempt  to  realise 
waste  land.  In  the  art  of  construction  Mr.  Martyn 
showed  himself  in  this  play  a  competent  student  of  Ibsen  ; 
the  poetry  and  beauty  of  natural  scenery  he  used  skilfully 
as  a  background  to  the  action  ;  but  the  relationship  of 
the  dialogue  to  the  characters  is  insecure  and  even  false. 
The  success  of  the  play  may  be  attributed  to  its  excellent 
construction  and,  consequently,  its  direct  appeal  to  the 
audience.  The  motif  of  Maeve  (1899)  is  the  same — 
Ireland's  choice  of  the  splendid  dream  in  place  of  the 
material  fact — but  this  mystic  and  symbolic  play  is  far 
withdrawn  from  the  everyday  character  of  The  Heather 
Field.  Mr.  Martyn's  first  play  seemed  to  hold  the  promise 


200     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

of  a  new  dramatist  whose  limitations  were,  perhaps, 
but  those  of  inexperience.  Unfortunately  he  belied  his 
first  promise  and  fell  back  upon  crude  sensationalism 
in  The  Enchanted  Sea  (1902),  political  propagandism  in 
A  Tale  of  a  Town  (1902),  the  drab  severity  and  impersonal 
dialogue  of  Ibsen  in  The  Place  Hunters  (1905)  and  Grange- 
colman  (1912). 

Mr.  Martyn  obviously  does  not  belong  to  the  central 
group  of  Irish  playwrights  who  adopt  an  artificial  and 
literary  simplicity  in  order  to  escape  the  trammels  of 
civilisation  and  shake  off  the  sophisticated  manners  of  a 
world  that  has  grown  a  weariness  to  them.  Their  style 
is  often  a  deliberate  artifice,  their  subjects  are  garnered 
from  dream-stories  of  the  past  or  unsullied  nooks  of 
primitive  life  and  thought  in  modern  Ireland.  With 
these  aims  Mr.  Martyn  has  nothing  in  common  save  his 
Irish  Nationalism.  He  dramatises  the  bourgeois  and 
middle-class  life  of  his  country  in  the  present  day ;  his 
peasants,  if  they  are  introduced,  are  but  foils  to  the  other 
characters  ;  his  art  he  has  learned  not  from  Mr.  Yeats 
and  Synge  but  from  Ibsen  ;  and  his  dialogue  approxi- 
mates to  Ibsen  in  his  most  serious  lapses  from  truth  to 
character.  Mr.  Martyn  would  be  as  successful,  neither 
more  nor  less,  were  his  scenes  laid  outside  Ireland.  The 
life  of  his  country  is  but  the  accidental  background  of 
his  drama ;  and  his  connection  with  the  Irish  Literary 
Theatre  is  equally  as  accidental. 

The  return  of  Mr.  Moore  to  Ireland,  his  active  participa- 
tion in  the  work  of  the  Irish  Theatre,  his  late-born  attempt 

to  recover  for  himself  the  heritage  of  the 
George  Moore,  Gael,  were  surprising  as  an  example  of 
b.  1853.  volte-face  in  the  disciple  of  the  French 

realists.  But  the  change  was  ushered  in 
with  a  prelude  :  not  only  was  Ulick  Dean,  in  Evelyn 
Innes,  studied  from  Mr.  Yeats,  but  the  anxious  pre- 
occupation of  the  narrative  and  its  sequel,  Sister  Teresa, 
with  spiritual  problems  was  an  outward  sign  of  new 
theory  and  discipleship.  And  in  1901  Mr.  Moore  returned 
to  Dublin,  to  live  there  for  a  large  part  of  the  next  ten 
years.  His  first  enthusiasm  soon  cooled  to  lukewarm- 
ness,  and  then  turned  to  sceptical  criticism.  And  the 
most  important  consequence  of  Mr.  Moore's  connection 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  201 

with  the  Abbey  Theatre  is  not  to  be  found  in  his  plays, 
but  in  The  Lake,  the  short  stories  of  The  Untilled  Field, 
and  hi  the  trilogy,  Hail  and  Farewell ;  for,  despite 
the  gift  of  dramatic  characterisation  exhibited  in  the 
novels,  Mr.  Moore  has  not  the  genius  of  a  writer  for  the 
stage. 

Before  his  conversion  to  the  cult  of  the  Gael  Mr.  Moore 
had  staged  The  Strike  at  Arlingford  (1893)  in  answer  to  a 
challenge  from  Mr.  G.  R.  Sims.  The  construction  of  this 
piece  is  good,  but  otherwise  it  has  little  to  recommend  it ; 
it  is  not  the  original  and  unconventional  piece  the  author 
hoped  to  make  it.  One  of  the  first  plays  produced  by 
the  Irish  Literary  Theatre,  Mr.  Moore's  Bending  of  the 
Bough  (1900),  was  a  complete  rewriting  of  Mr.  Martyn's 
Tale  of  a  Town,  after  it  had  been  refused  in  its  earlier 
form.  In  credibility  of  action  Mr.  Moore  may  have 
improved  upon  his  original ;  but  just  where  the  author 
is  strongest  in  his  novels  he  is  weakest  in  The  Bending 
of  the  Bough.  It  is  a  colourless  production,  its  dialogue 
largely  in  the  air  and  devoid  of  local  characteristics — a 
play  made  in  the  study  about  people  whom  the  author 
has  not  known  intimately.  His  next  play,  Diarmid  and 
Grania  (1901),  was  the  result  of  collaboration  with  Mr. 
Yeats  in  the  dramatisation  of  one  of  Ireland's  ancient 
legends.  In  the  realm  of  the  mythic  and  legendary  Mr. 
Moore  is  not  at  his  ease,  and  Mr.  Yeats  who  is  has  been 
overpowered  by  his  collaborator,  with  the  consequence 
that  the  play  is  false  in  atmosphere. 

With  Diarmid  and  Grania  Mr.  Moore's  direct  support 
of  the  Irish  Theatre  with  his  pen  ceased,  although  he  has 
since  made  one  or  two  further  essays  in  the  art  of  dramatic 
writing.  Esther  Waters  in  dramatised  version  (1911) 
proved,  however,  lengthy  and  ineffective  :  and  Elizabeth 
Cooper  (1913),  containing  an  excellent  subject  for  light 
farce  thrown  away  by  mishandling,  came  only  as  if  to 
show  that  Mr.  Moore  had  turned  to  the  stage  too  late 
and  did  not  possess  the  knowledge  required  of  the  play- 
wright. His  connection  with  the  Celtic  Movement  as 
with  the  stage  has  been  incidental  and  fortuitous,  and 
to  discover  the  true  genius  of  Mr.  Moore  we  must  turn 
to  him  when  he  is  writing  in  other  veins  and  after  another 
manner. 


202     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

Mr.  Martyn  and  Mr.  Moore  have  long  since  dropped 
away  from  the  other  founders  of  the  Irish  Literary 

Theatre  ;  but  Mr.  Yeats  and  Lady  Gregory 
Lady  Gregory,  remain,  and  to  the  latter  the  repertory  of 
b.  1852.  the  Abbey  Theatre  owes  some  of  its  best 

caprices  and  farcical  dialogues.  Neverthe- 
less in  Our  Irish  Theatre  (1913),  in  which  Lady  Gregory 
relates  the  fortunes  of  the  Abbey  Theatre,  she  informs  us 
that  until  she  was  carried  into  the  new  movement  she 
"  never  cared  much  for  the  stage."  Nor  did  the  renascence 
of  interest  in  Irish  life  and  literature  prompt  her  at  first 
to  dramatic  writing.  To  Lady  Gregory,  Dr.  Hyde  and 
Mr.  Yeats  has  chiefly  fallen  the  task  of  resuscitating  the 
older  cycles  of  Gaelic  legend.  Their  place  in  the  story  of 
literature  will  be  found  in  Dr.  Hyde's  Literary  History  of 
Ireland ;  Mr.  Yeats  has  used  the  tales  of  Finn  and 
Cuchulain  in  his  dramas  and  dramatic  poems,  On  Bailees 
Strand,  Deirdre  and  The  Wanderings  of  Oisin  ;  to  Lady 
Gregory  it  was  left  to  arrange  the  two  greater  cycles  and 
adapt  them  to  English  prose  narrative,  written  with  an 
artifice  and  simplicity  which  make  her  books  among  the 
most  delightful  to  English  readers  of  any  that  have  come 
out  of  Ireland  in  recent  years.  In  Gods  and  Fighting  Men 
(1904)  she  has  collected  the  older  cycles  of  the  Tuatha 
de  Danaan  and  the  Fianna,  including  the  stories  of  Finn, 
Diarmuid  and  Oisin,  in  Cuchulain  of  Muirthemne  (1902) 
are  gathered  the  later  stories  of  the  Red  Branch  cycle, 
which  centre  in  the  hero,  Cuchulain.  And  in  the  same 
style  are  written  the  stories  of  a  different  character  con- 
tained in  the  Book  of  Saints  and  Wonders  (1908).  These 
legends  are  written,  to  use  Lady  Gregory's  phrase,  "  in 
the  manner  of  the  thatched  houses,"  that  is  in  the  idiom 
of  Irish  peasant  speech.  Lady  Gregory  attributes  the 
"  Kiltartan  English  "  of  her  prose  adaptations  and  plays 
to  the  influence  of  the  idiom  employed  by  Dr.  Hyde  in 
his  translations  from  the  songs  of  Connacht.  This  style, 
with  the  admixture  in  each  case  of  whatever  element  of 
personality  may  individually  be  possible,  has  become  the 
common  property  of  a  number  of  the  Irish  writers,  and, 
though  it  may  be  an  impertinence  of  the  reader  who  can 
claim  but  the  slightest  knowledge  of  Irish  peasant  speech 
to  doubt  the  reality  of  this  dialect,  it  is  difficult  to  avoid 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  203 

a  suspicion  that  it  is  an  artifice  as  unreal  as  the  earlier 
convention  of  Lover  and  Lever.  By  admirers  it  is  asserted 
that  "  Kiltartan  English  "  is  a  living  speech  ;  but  to  Mr. 
Moore  it  is  only  known  as  a  literary  device,  and  a  device 
not  always  handled  with  skill.  The  unfamiliarity  of  the 
idiom,  the  quaint  turns  of  speech,  the  inversion  of  common 
order  in  words  take  the  English  reader  by  surprise  and 
delight  him  with  the  charm  of  the  unexpected.  It  is  only 
on  a  re-reading  that  the  literary  artificiality,  the  tortured 
simplicity  of  the  style  become  apparent,  and  it  ceases  to 
give  the  clear  ring  of  good  coin.  Lady  Gregory  and  those 
who  follow  the  path  of  "  Kiltartan  English  "  gain  their 
effect  largely  by  sprinkling  the  page  at  odd  moments 
with  far-sought  idioms  and  curious  inversions,  as  spangles 
are  inserted  on  a  material  yet  form  no  true  part  of  its 
texture.  The  scattered  spangles  are  superimposed,  and 
"  Kiltartan  English,"  in  like  manner,  has  all  the  appear- 
ance of  being  manufactured  by  sprinkling  modern  literary 
English  with  local  idioms.  It  is  a  convention,  and  a  good 
convention,  but  whether  it  is  more  seems  doubtful.  As 
Lady  Gregory  handles  it,  however,  it  has  quaintness, 
beauty  and  charm  ;  and  in  rendering  the  romances  of 
a  dim  and  legendary  world  it  justifies  itself. 

Lady  Gregory  has  told  us  that  she  first  wrote  plays 
to  relieve  audiences  who  were,  perhaps,  in  danger  of  being 
wearied  by  the  verse  and  romance  of  A.  E.,  Mr.  Yeats 
and  Synge.  Nevertheless  she,  also,  has  dramatised  tales 
from  the  legendary  and  romantic  period  of  Ireland  ;  but, 
despite  her  success  in  translating  and  adapting  the  ancient 
tales,  she  is  not  altogether  happy  in  the  atmosphere  of 
historic  drama.  Kincora  (1905)  carries  us  back  to  Ireland 
of  the  eleventh  century.  It  is  not  only  without  the  large- 
ness that  Synge  and  the  lyric  intensity  Mr.  Yeats  would 
have  brought  to  the  same  theme — it  is  weak  and  even 
false  in  sentiment.  Dervorgilla  (1907)  dramatises  loosely 
and  not  very  effectively  the  heart-sorrow  of  Dervorgilla, 
who  brought  the  great  curse  upon  Ireland  by  introducing 
the  English.  In  Grania  (1912)  the  story  is  carried  to  a 
prehistoric  epoch  ;  and  in  this  one  play  of  old  Ireland 
Lady  Gregory  shows  herself  capable  of  writing  great  and 
romantic  tragedy,  though  a  tragedy  of  the  soul  better 
understood  in  the  reading  than  the  acting.  In  this 


204     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

play  she  handles  her  literary  idiom,  here  so  congruous 
and  fitting,  with  singular  power  and  beauty.  The  White 
Cockade  (1905)  and  The  Canavans  (1906)  have  their 
historic  setting  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries, 
and  the  latter  is  chiefly  successful  in  its  representation 
of  the  Irish  peasantry,  who  have  not  greatly  changed 
from  the  days  of  Elizabeth  to  our  own. 

Lady  Gregory's  historical  dramas  have  been  collected 
in  Irish  Folk-history  Plays  (1912),  and  the  whole  content 
of  these  two  volumes,  if  Grania  be  excepted,  affords  but 
the  slightest  indication  of  strong  dramatic  talent.  These 
historical  plays  are  written  with  good  intention,  gifts  of 
phrase  and  style,  a  deep  love  of  Ireland  and  its  people, 
but  they  fail  dramatically,  for  the  action,  where  there  is 
any,  is  but  unconvincingly  related  to  the  characters.  And 
if  the  same  charge  is  to  be  brought  against  The  Image 
(1910),  its  proper  apology  is  that  the  whole  piece  is 
allegorical  farce,  attempting  no  realistic  treatment  of 
character  and  situation.  It  is  a  play  of  modern  Ireland 
suffused  with  esoteric  meaning.  The  image  which  the 
humble  stone-mason  is  to  carve  is  the  province  of  Connacht, 
and  the  diverse  attitudes  toward  the  project  of  characters 
in  the  play  is  figurative  of  the  vision  of  a  future  Ireland 
as  it  appears  to  differing  minds.  But  the  esoteric  meaning, 
unless  explained,  is  hard  to  come  by,  and  might  not  be 
suspected  by  the  English  reader  ;  the  dialogue  is  loose 
and  rambling  ;  and  dramatically  the  piece  does  not  arrest 
the  attention. 

Lady  Gregory's  best  work  for  the  stage  is  to  be  found 
in  her  one-act  farces  and  dialogues.  These  have  been 
collected  in  Seven  Short  Plays  (1909)  and  New  Irish 
Comedies  (1914).  Many  of  them  turn  upon  the  motif 
of  a  whimsical  misunderstanding.  Spreading  the  News 
(1904)  is  a  laughable  skit  upon  the  absurd  proportions  a 
false  rumour  assumes  as  it  spreads  from  mouth  to  mouth. 
Hyacinth  Halvey  (1906)  sketches  an  episode  in  the  career 
of  a  young  man  who  comes  from  Carrow  to  Cloon  armed 
with  a  huge  parcel  of  glowing  testimonials  to  the  unparal- 
leled integrity  of  his  character.  He  is  a  very  ordinary  young 
man,  not  above  the  love  of  a  spree,  and  the  exalted  opinion 
the  townsfolk  of  Cloon  conceive  of  him  on  the  strength  of 
his  testimonials  becomes  an  intolerable  burden,  making 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  205 

him  long  for  death.  He  steals  the  carcase  of  a  sheep  in 
order  to  disillusion  his  admirers,  only  to  be  overwhelmed 
with  the  gratitude  of  the  butcher  who  has  thereby  been 
saved  from  conviction  for  stocking  tainted  meat.  He 
robs  a  Protestant  church,  and  when  he  avows  the  deed 
is  hailed  as  the  magnanimous  hero  who  takes  the  sin  on 
his  shoulders  to  save  a  poor  lad  who  is  suspect ;  and 
forthwith  he  is  chaired  away  to  a  meeting  to  deliver  an 
address  on  the  building  up  of  character.  The  Jackdaw 
(1907)  and  The  Workhouse  Ward  (1908)  turn  upon  the 
like  ingenious  entanglements  of  circumstance.  In  all 
these  one-act  plays  the  dexterity  of  the  dialogue,  the 
neatness  of  the  artifice,  the  dovetailing  of  misconception 
and  cross-purpose  have  the  perfection  of  an  effortless 
feat  in  skilful  juggling,  a  combination  of  touch  and  sense 
of  balance  that  could  in  no  wise  be  bettered.  Not  less 
delightful  are  the  whimsical  turns  of  thought  and  speech 
which  Lady  Gregory  gives  to  her  characters.  There  is, 
for  example,  the  old  army  pensioner  who  takes  pride  of 
scholarship  in  the  memory  that  once  he  used  to  sleep 
"  in  the  one  bed  with  two  boys  that  were  learning  Greek." 

Of  an  entirely  different  character  is  The  Gaol  Gate 
(1906),  which  closes  with  a  long  lament  in  Biblical  language. 
The  lament  is  beautiful  and  deeply  moving,  but  utterly 
undramatic  in  its  context.  This  tragic  little  sketch  can 
only  be  spoiled  in  the  acting  ;  for  the  materialisation  of 
the  scene — the  helplessness  of  two  poor  women,  a  mother 
and  a  wife,  who  discover  at  the  prison  door  that  the  man 
nearest  their  heart  has  been  executed — defines  in  harsh 
outline  what  can  only  be  conceived  as  the  poetry  of  the 
soul.  Most  beautiful  also  in  conception  is  MacDonough's 
Wife  (1911),  which  tells  how  the  wandering  musician 
with  the  lament  of  his  pipes  drew  from  the  fair  and  the 
sheep-shearing  all  men  to  the  grave  of  his  wife. 

Lady  Gregory's  genius  in  dramatic  writing  shines  most 
clearly  in  exaggerated  comedy  and  farcical  dialogue. 
Grania,  The  Gaol  Gate  and  MacDonough's  Wife,  in  which 
she  essays  tragedy,  romantically  and  poetically  conceived, 
do  not  lend  themselves  to  the  stage,  for  she  is  without  the 
gifts  necessary  to  success  in  that  form  of  drama  in  which 
Synge  is  immeasurably  beyond  all  his  contemporaries 
whether  in  Ireland  or  England.  Style  and  fine  speeches 


206     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

drama  may  contain,  but  it  can  never  be  built  upon  these 
alone.  The  greatness  of  Synge  lies  in  his  large  poetic 
conception,  his  broad  outline,  his  massings  of  light  and 
shadow,  n.ot  in  his  style.  If,  however,  Lady  Gregory  is 
by  no  means  at  her  best  in  romantic  drama,  she  has  the 
power  to  write  dialogue  in  a  mood  of  everyday  humour, 
with  whimsical  turns  of  thought  and  expression,  that  is 
quick,  racy  and  flexible,  and  it  is  this  faculty  which  makes 
her  short  farcical  sketches  the  finest  of  their  kind  the 
Abbey  Theatre  has  produced.  Not  only  is  the  economy 
in  word  and  phrase  admirable,  the  touch  incomparably 
light  and  deft,  but  her  humour,  exaggerated  and  grotesque 
though  it  may  sometimes  be,  never  blunderingly  trans- 
gresses the  limits  of  the  probable  or  destroys  illusion  by 
grating  needlessly  against  our  powers  of  belief.  Lady 
Gregory's  historical  plays  are  best  read  ;  her  farces  are 
equally  good  in  the  reading  and  on  the  stage.  Their 
niceness  and  aptitude  in  the  portrayal  of  character  through 
swift  and  easy  dialogue  has  rarely  been  equalled. 

John  Millington  Synge,  indubitably  the  strongest  and 
most  original  genius  of  the  contemporary  Celtic  Revival, 
came   late   into   his   own ;     and   four 
John  Millington  or    five    years    cover    that    period    of 

Synge,  1871-1909.  his  productivity  which  is  of  any 
account.  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen 
was  performed  at  the  Molesworth  Hall,  Dublin,  in  1903, 
and  early  in  1909  Synge  died  in  a  private  hospital.  He 
was  born  at  Rathfarnham,  County  Dublin,  in  1871,  and 
received  his  education  at  Trinity  College,  Dublin.  After 
this  he  spent  some  years  in  Germany  and  in  Paris  reading, 
and  writing  unsuccessfully  in  a  desultory  manner.  He 
also  travelled  the  roads  through  Italy,  France  and  Bavaria, 
supporting  himself  apparently,  on  an  income  of  forty 
pounds  a  year.  In  1899  he  was  discovered  in  Paris  by 
Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  Synge  showed  him  some  of  his  essays 
in  authorship,  but  Mr.  Yeats  perceiving  that  so  far  "  life 
had  cast  no  light  on  his  writings,"  advised  him  to  "  Go 
to  the  Aran  Islands.  Live  there  as  if  you  were  one  of  the 
people  themselves  ;  express  a  life  that  has  never  found 
expression."  Synge  took  the  advice,  and  for  the  next  few 
years  habitually  lived  part  of  his  time  on  Aran  studying 
the  islanders  and  making  notes  of  their  idioms  and  speech. 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  207 

Mr.  Yeats  has  an  admirable  sentence  in  which  the 
character  of  Synge  and  the  whole  personality  of  the  man 
is  set  before  us  :  "  He  was  a  drifting  silent  man  full  of 
hidden  passion,  and  loved  wild  islands,  because  there, 
set  out  in  the  light  of  day,  he  saw  what  lay  hidden  in 
himself."  The  Aran  Islands  was  not  published  till  1907, 
but  it  was  written  three  or  four  years  earlier.  The  book 
is  stored  with  those  impressions  .which  are  the  making  of 
Synge' s  plays  ;  here  are  their  plots  as  well  as  their  dialect 
and  setting.  Here,  for  example,  is  the  story  of  the  old 
woman  who  saw  her  drowned  son  riding  toward  the  sea 
on  a  horse.  In  Riders  to  the  Sea  Maurya  cries,  "  I  looked 
up  then,  and  I  crying,  at  the  gray  pony,  and  there  was 
Michael  upon  it — with  fine  clothes  on  him,  and  new  shoes 
on  his  feet."  In  The  Aran  Islands,  or  in  West  Kerry  and 
In  Wicklow  (1906-7),  may  be  discovered  the  seed  of  most 
of  Synge' s  plots — the  anecdote  of  the  man  who  killed 
his  father  with  a  spade,  afterwards  used  in  The  Playboy, 
the  story  of  the  two  tinkers  who  agreed  with  the  priest 
to  marry  them  for  a  half-sovereign  and  a  "  fine  can," 
used  in  The  Tinker's  Wedding.  And,  of  more  importance, 
living  in  the  west  among  the  people  and  as  one  of  them, 
listening  to  their  talk  in  shebeens  and  cabins  of  Aran, 
overhearing  servant  girls  through  a  chink  in  the  floor, 
noting  down  faithfully  impressions  of  mist  and  sea  and 
land,  and  setting  down  word  for  word  innumerable 
phrases  of  peasant  speech  Synge  gathered  directly  from 
life  the  matter  that  makes  his  plays.  Few  men  could 
have  been  less  interested  in  the  literature  of  the  day,  in 
the  thought  or  the  politics  of  the  world.  In  his  later 
years  he  read  hardly  any  books,  and  was  scarcely  known 
to  express  an  opinion  on  a  modern  writer.  Yet  Synge 
has  left  behind  him  a  drama  which  is  at  once  faithful  to 
life  and  literary.  The  power  to  write  and  the  knowledge 
of  books  have  not  always  been  close  companions  ;  but 
where  the  influence  of  books  is  little  the  gap  must  be 
filled  with  a  theory  :  even  Shakespeare  had  a  theory  of 
craft  and  style  which  he  followed  with  surprising  close- 
ness. And  Synge's  theory  was  developed  by  the  experiences 
recorded  in  his  journal  kept  on  the  western  islands.  By 
nature  reserved  and  uncommunicative  he  never  spoke 
much  of  himself  or  his  ideals  ;  but  The  Aran  Jslands 


208     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

came  as  near  as  he  could  approach  to  the  writing  of  a 
personal  confession  ;  and,  judged  from  a  purely  literary 
standpoint,  it  is,  perhaps,  together  with  The  Well  of  the 
Saints,  his  finest  and  most  distinctive  piece  of  work. 
Interest  in  human  nature  is  the  ruling  motive  from  the 
first  page  to  the  last,  yet  the  clouds,  the  wide  skies,  the 
bleak  islands  the  rocky  shores  washed  by  the  rustling 
sea,  are  painted  with  a  perfection  of  power  and  beauty. 
In  his  poems  Synge  gave  little  evidence  of  sensitiveness 
to  environment,  but  in  his  prose  and  his  dramas  it  con- 
stantly emerges.  In  The  Aran  Islands  we  read  of  a  day 
of  storm  : 

"  For  the  rest  of  my  walk  I  saw  no  living  thing  but 
one  flock  of  curlews,  and  a  few  pipits  hiding  among  the 
stones. 

"  About  the  sunset  the  clouds  broke  and  the  storm 
turned  to  a  hurricane.  Bars  of  purple  cloud  stretched 
across  the  sound  where  immense  waves  were  rolling 
from  the  west,  wreathed  with  snowy  phantasies  of 
spray.  Then  there  was  the  bay  full  of  green  delirium, 
and  the  Twelve  Pins  touched  with  mauve  and  scarlet 
in  the  east. 

"  The  suggestion  from  this  world  of  inarticulate 
power  was  immense,  and  now  at  midnight,  when  the 
wind  is  abating,  I  am  still  trembling  and  flushed  with 
exultation." 

The  passage  is  enough  to  show  the  reserved  and  grave 
simplicity  of  Synge' s  prose  style  ;  and  among  topographical 
books  The  Aran  Islands  will  probably  in  time  take  its 
place  in  English  with  the  few  itineraries  that  belong  to 
literature.  For  it  is,  despite  what  has  already  been  said, 
chiefly  a  book  of  topography,  miscellany,  anecdote,  not 
a  personal  journal :  Synge  holds  himself  in  reserve, 
looking  out  objectively  on  the  life  of  the  islands. 

In  the  study  The  Aran  Islands  will,  perhaps,  be  taken 
off  the  shelf  more  often  than  any  volume  of  Synge  ;  never- 
theless his  great  work,  and  the  word  great  may  here  be 
used  advisedly,  is  in  his  dramas,  which  are  all  short.  In 
1903  and  1904  two  one-act  plays  In  the  Shadow  of  the 
Glen  and  Riders  to  the  Sea,  were  produced  in  Dublin  ; 
three  three-act  plays,  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  The  Playboy 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  209 

of  the  Western  World  and  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows,  followed 
between  1905  and  1910  ;  and  The  Tinker's  Wedding,  a 
play  in  two  acts,  was  first  produced  in  London  in  1909. 
These  plays  at  first  met  with  a  hostile  reception.  Ireland 
took  a  pride  in  the  chastity  of  its  peasant  women  and  on 
this  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen  seemed  to  reflect ;  and  The 
Playboy  of  the  Western  World,  which  was  supposed  to 
exalt  into  a  hero  the  man  who  had  slain  his  father,  aroused 
furious  anger.  These  demonstrations  illustrate  the  curious 
lapses  from  humour  of  the  Irish  mind  ;  for  the  Irishman, 
when  serious,  has  the  least  flexible  intelligence  in  the  world. 
That  Synge's  six  plays  were  a  great  and  notable  event 
in  the  story  of  English  dramatic  writing  cannot  be  gain- 
said, and  the  passage  of  time  will  almost  certainly  give 
them  a  more  assured  place  than  they  hold  to-day.  But 
in  the  last  few  years  our  ears  have  been  deafened  with 
noisy  and  undiscriminating  praise  of  Synge's  work,  which 
has  been  lauded  as  the  greatest  thing  in  English  since 
Shakespeare.  When  we  remember  that  George  Eliot 
received  exactly  the  same  praise  of  men  we  are  given  reason 
for  pause.  We  still  stand  so  close  to  Synge  that  the  attempt 
to  assign  definite  rank  to  his  drama  is  hazardous  ;  yet  it 
seems  unlikely  that  he  will  pass  out  of  sight  and  regard. 
In  his  work  four  great  qualities  combine — the  faculty 
of  dramatic  visualisation,  reverence  for  reality,  poetry  in 
concept  and  thought,  and  the  unexpected  in  style.  When 
Synge's  admirers  compare  his  work  to  the  plays  of  the 
Elizabethan  age  they  are  primarily  thinking  of  the  poetry 
in  his  drama.  In  the  permeating  of  drama  with  poetry 
it  is  difficult  to  think  of  anything  in  English  greater  or 
more  significant  than  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  Riders  to 
the  Sea  and  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows.  It  was  the  belief  of 
Synge  that  in  Ireland  "  for  a  few  years  more  we  have  a 
popular  imagination  that  is  fiery  and  magnificent  and 
tender,"  and  therefore  it  was  possible  to  write  in  Ireland 
a  drama  not  sick  and  intellectual  like  the  drama  of 
London,  Paris  and  Berlin,  but  a  drama  inspired  by  reality 
and  joy.  Joy  may  appear  a  curious  term  to  apply  to 
the  themes  of  Synge's  plays — a  wife  driven  to  a  frenzy 
of  unrest  by  the  lack  of  companionship  in  an  old  and 
phlegmatic  husband,  the  mother  who  mourns  her  sons 
swallowed  by  the  sea,  the  halo  surrounding  a  weak 


210     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS      [PART  n 

stripling  who  thinks  he  has  murdered  his  father,  the  harsh 
tragedy  of  the  Deirdre  legend — but  by  joy  Synge  meant 
the  strong  impulse  and  spirit  of  poetry  latent  in  emotional 
natures  uncorroded  by  the  conventions  of  civilisation, 
the  imagination  tender  and  fiery  whether  it  shows  itself 
outwardly  in  ecstasy  or  in  brooding  melancholy.  In  the 
midst  of  the  rationalised  life  led  by  men  in  great  centres 
of  activity  and  their  broad  outskirts  the  primitive  and 
passionate  impulse  is  almost  entirely  checked.  In  the 
west  of  Ireland,  far  removed  from  the  ephemeral  fashions 
of  Europe,  man  is  still  passionate  as  he  was  in  the  England 
of  Elizabeth,  in  the  world  dramatised  by  Shakespeare, 
Marlowe  and  Webster.  The  joy  of  life  for  Synge  was  the 
transfiguring  power  of  the  primitive,  the  poetical  and 
the  eternal  in  man. 

In  combination  with  this  absorbing  consciousness  of 
the  profound  vigour  and  joy  of  life  Synge  possessed 
dramatic  gifts  higher  than  those  of  any  English-writing 
dramatist  of  our  day.  He  deals  with  no  surprising 
incident,  sensationalism  has  no  part  to  play  in  his  art ; 
but  the  wedding  of  a  travelling  tinker  and  his  doxy 
becomes  matter  equally  as  dramatic  as  the  story  of  The 
Duchess  of  Malfi.  In  the  craft  of  the  dramatist,  it  is  true, 
Synge  does  not  outdo  many  between  the  time  of  Shake- 
speare and  the  end  of  the  twentieth  century.  Congreve, 
Wycherley,  Goldsmith,  Sheridan  had  at  least  as  much 
dramatic  sense,  and  Beddoes  almost  as  much  poetry  and 
drama  combined.  It  is  easily  possible  to  overstate  the 
achievement  of  Synge  in  this  respect.  That  he  far  sur- 
passes Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  in  dramatic  faculty  needs  no 
saying ;  but  Mr.  Padraic  Colum  in  The  Fiddler's  House, 
Mr.  Mayne  in  The  Drone  are  scarcely  a  whit  behind  Synge 
in  economy  of  dialogue,  clear  visualisation  of  character 
and  proportionate  spacing  of  their  matter.  They  are,  how- 
ever, immeasurably  behind  him  in  poetry,  in  the  power  to 
render  atmosphere,  in  the  suggestion  of  universal  signifi- 
cance within  a  narrow  theme,  and  in  individuality  of  style. 

Synge  opposed  reality  to  intellectualism  :  and  herein 
lies  the  third  definitive  distinction  of  his  dramatic  achieve- 
ment. The  drama  of  Europe  has  been  intellectual  for 
centuries.  Moliere's  comedy  is  fashioned  by  processes  of 
intellect  confined  within  the  chambers  of  an  individual 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  211 

mind  ;  Dumas  and  Scribe,  to  leap  across  the  years,  are 
intellectual  gymnasts,  even  in  the  rendering  of  emotion. 
Ibsen,  perceiving  that  the  drama  of  Scribe  was  outworn, 
set  a  new  standard  ;  but  if  ever  there  were  a  drama  of 
hot-house  intellectualism  it  is  to  be  found  in  Ibsen,  who 
confessed  that  his  plays  were  "  deeds  of  night,"  com- 
posed in  the  dark  recesses  of  his  mind.  It  is  the  high 
merit  of  the  purely  Irish  school  of  dramatists  that  they 
represent  a  reaction  against  intellectual  drama.  Mr. 
Moore  and  Mr.  Martyn  have  remained  with  Ibsen  ;1  but 
the  Irish  dramatists  as  a  body  owe  him  little  ;  their  debt 
is  to  reality  not  to  detached  ratiocination.  And  to  Synge 
was  chiefly  due  the  offset  against  Ibsenism  of  great 
romantic  drama.  The  impossible  and  preposterous  in  the 
characters  of  Ibsen  and  Mr.  Shaw  lies  in  the  obsessions  of 
intellectualism  and  the  sophistries  of  the  pulpit.  Nora,  in 
A  Doll's  House,  not  only  realises  herself  upon  a  sudden  but 
expresses  herself  with  a  force  and  comprehensiveness  of 
outlook  which  would  only  be  possible  after  years  of 
reflection  ;  Mr.  Shaw's  otherwise  admirable  Father  Keegan, 
the  daft  and  mystical  dreamer  whom  even  villagers  pity, 
suddenly  iutters  a  new  trinitarian  theology  of  modern 
social  condtions.  In  either  case  the  dramatists  led^astray 
by  reading  his  intellectual  prepossessions  into  his^creature. 
It  may  sometimes  appear  that  Synge  strains  our  powers 
of  belief  in  the  same  manner.  After  reading  The  Playboy 
we  are  tempted  to  ask  :  Is  it  possible  that  a  country-girl 
would  be  filled  with  admiration  for  a  vagrant  who  con- 
fesses that  he  slew  his  father  in  a  fit  of  passion  ?  When 
Christy  boasts  to  the  company  gathered  in  the  shebeen 
that  a  prison  is  behind  him,  hanging  before  and  f  hell 
gaping  below,  Pegeen  is  incredulously  scornful,  but  when 
convinced  she  is  filled  with  admiration  of  one  capable 

of  being  carried1  by  anger  to  the  killing^of  his'father.      V*^ 

••.•<.'•  --""*~',  -'\\^     ••,:*>?i 

''r''r'->  'jfiff  -.-:£•'  -1! 

"/PEGEEN.'?  You're  only  saying  it.  You  did"nothing 
at  1  all.  A  soft  lad  the  like  of  you  wouldn't  slit  the 
windpipe  of  a  screeching  sow. 

CHRISTY  (offended).    You're  not  speaking  the  truth. 

PEGEEN  (in  mock  rage).  NotTspeaking  the  truth,  is 
it$t?  Would  you  have  me  knock  the  head  of  you  with 
the  butt  of  the  broom  ? 


212     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

CHRISTY  (twisting  round  on  her  with  a  sharp  cry  of 
horror}.  Don't  strike  me.  I  killed  my  poor  father, 
Tuesday  was  a  week,  for  doing  the  like  of  that. 

PEGEEN  (with  blank  amazement}.  Is  it  killed  your 
father  ? 

CHRISTY  (subsiding).  With  the  help  of  God  I  did, 
surely,  and  that  the  Holy  Immaculate  Mother  may 
intercede  for  his  soul." 

This  fills  Pegeen  with  naive  admiration,  and  later, 
when  she  has  the  opportunity  of  talking  to  Christy  alone, 
she  says  :  "  And  I've  heard  at  all  times  it's  the  poets  are 
your  like — fine,  fiery  fellows,  with  great  rages  when  their 
temper's  roused."  When  again,  at  a  later  stage,  she  learns 
that  Christy  only  succeeded  in  stunning  his  father  she 
rounds  upon  him  in  angry  contempt :  "  And  to  think  of 
the  coaxing  glory  we  had  given  him,  and  he  after  doing 
nothing  but  hitting  a  soft  blow  and  chasing  northward 
in  a  sweat  of  fear.  Quit  off  from  this."  On  a  first  impres- 
sion Pegeen  appears  a  preposterous  character,  and  the 
whole  play  reads  like  one  of  the  manufactured  situations 
of  Ibsen  or  Mr.  Shaw  ;  but  we  learn  that  the  admiration 
of  Pegeen  Mike  and  the  frequenters  of  the  shebeen  for 
the  man  who  is  supposed  to  have  murdered  his  father 
exactly  represents  the  probable  attitude  toward  a  criminal 
of  peasantry  in  untouched  regions  of  Western  Ireland. 
They  accept  the  fact  that  no  man  would  kill  his  father 
deliberately,  and  nobody  is  to  be  held  accountable  for  his 
acts  when  "  great  rages  "  are  upon  him.  This  offers  a 
plausible  explanation  of  what  at  first  appears  to  the 
sophisticated  mind  an  artificial  situation.  But  for  Ibsen's 
worst  offences  against  the  possible  in  human  nature  there 
is  no  explanation,  save  that  reality  cannot  be  conjured 
out  of  the  mazes  of  intellectualism. 

Synge,  however,  had  no  intellectual  interests.1";  He  cared 
nothing  about  theories  of  life  ;  he  had  no  message  like 
Ibsen,  Maeterlinck  or  Mr.  Shaw  ;"  his  sole  concern  was 
with  living  men  and  women.  In  an  age  when  literature, 
between  the  planes  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Hauptmann, 
is  saturated  with  propagandism,  Synge  emerges  as  a 
writer  of  outstanding  power  who  has  no  message  of  any 
kind.  And  for  this  alone  he  deserves  peculiar  honour. 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  218 

For  the  dialogue  of  his  drama  Synge  invented  a^  style 
in  which  he  professed  to  use  no  words  which  he  had  not 
heard  on  the  lips  of  peasants,  to  write  in  the  idiom  of 
the  man  who  thinks  in  Gaelic  when  he  speaks  in  English. 
But  shades  of  pronunciation  are  not  rendered,  and  the 
sentences  are  too  rounded  and  rhythmical  to  be  those  of 
everyday  speech.  Nobody  in  real  life  ever  talked  like 
the  characters  of  Synge.  The  speech  of  these  plays~is  a 
literary  convention,  and,  in  some  degree  at  least,  it  is  a 
mosaic.  In  Western  Ireland  the  peasant  often  speaks  in 
English  with  a  Gaelic  idiom  because  he  is  thinking  in 
Gaelic  ;  but  in  Eastern  and  Central  Ireland  where  English 
has  been  spoken  for  centuries  Elizabethan  forms  survive. 
Thus  in  Synge' s  style  we  have  Elizabethan  English,  the 
English  of  the  Bible  and  Gaelic  idiom  jostling  each  other. 
Old  Maurya  (Riders  to  the  Sea),  lamenting  her  son,  is  a 
woman  whose  tongue  is  Gaelic  : 

"  They're  all  gone  now,  and  there  isn't  anything 
more  the  sea  can  do  to  me  ...  I'll  have  no  call  now 
to  be  up  crying  and  praying  when  the  wind  backs 
from  the  south,  and  you  can  hear  the  surf  in  the  east, 
and  the  surf  in  the  west,  making  a  great  stir  with  the 
two  noises,  and  they  hitting  one  on  the  other.  I'll 
have  no  call  now  to  be  going  down  and  getting  Holy 
Water  in  the  dark  nights  after  Samhain,  and  I  won't 
care  what  way  the  sea  is  when  the  other  women  will 
be  keening." 

But  in  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows,  in  which  Synge  goes  back 
to  an  old  and  legendary  world,  he  writes  in  a  speech 
mingled  of  Gaelic  idiom  and  the  intonations  of  the 
Authorised  Version  of  the  Bible. 

"  Lay  out  your  mats  and  hangings  where  I  can 
stand  this  night  and  look  about  me.  Lay  out  the 
skins  of  the  rams  of  Connaught  and  of  the  goats  of 
the  west.  I  will  not  be  a  child  or  a  plaything  ;  I'll 
put  on  my  robes  that  are  the  richest,  for  I  will  not  be 
brought  down  to  Emain  as  Cuchulain  brings  his  horse 
to  the  yoke,  or  Conall  Cearneach  puts  his  shield  upon 
his  arm  ;  and  maybe  from  this  day  I  will  turn  the  men 
of  Ireland  like  a  wind  blowing  on  the  heath." 


214     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

This  is  scarcely  modified  Biblical  English ;  and  the 
language  the  translators  of  King  James  employed  was 
archaic  even  in  their  day.  Synge  was  led  to  an  extreme 
because  he  ignored  the  fact  that  in  English  the  idiom  of 
literature  has  never  been  the  idiom  of  the  spoken  lan- 
guage. In  poetry  this  has  always  been  true,  save  for 
lapses  in  the  eighteenth  century  ;  in  prose  the  contrast 
is  less  marked,  but  it  exists.  People  never  talked  like 
the  Religio  Medici,  nor  do  they  speak  now  as  Lafcadio 
Hearn  or  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad  write.  Synge  laboured 
under  the  illusion  that  he  had  discovered  an  original,  a 
tender  and  imaginative  speech  in  the  talk  of  the  peasantry 
of  Ireland,  just  as  Wordsworth,  a  century  earlier,  found 
the  Cumberland  dalesman  speaking  in  "  the  real  language 
of  men."  The  language  of  the  Cumberland  labourer,  how- 
ever, was  no  more  real  than  the  language  of  the  Bible  and 
the  Prayer  Book,  whence  it  reached  him,  and  it  was  poorer 
in  vocabulary.  In  like  manner  the  spoken  English  of  the 
west  of  Ireland  is  not  a  better  or  more  real  language 
than  the  best  English  of  books  because  it  is  contorted 
with  Gaelic  idioms  and  the  words  are  few.  The  drama 
and  the  novel  which  reproduce  a  true  dialect  have  their 
justification.  Synge  only  succeeded  in  producing  a  con- 
vention which  delights  with  its  quaint  inconsequences, 
just  as  the  faltering  language  of  children  has  its  vigour 
and  charm.  But  it  may  be  conceded  to  him  that  he 
made  the  convention  as  real  and  individual  to  himself  as 
the  translators  of  King  James  made  the  English  of  the 
Bible.  When  he  wrote  his  dramas  he  thought  in  the 
language  he  invented. 

Every  page  of  his  plays  shows  that  Synge  understood 
the  requirements  of  the  stage ;  but,  on  the  whole,  with 
the  exception  of  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  he  is  at  his  best 
in  the  shortest  pieces.  In  The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World  the  latter  part  of  the  second  and  the  whole  of  the 
third  act  overweigh  the  introduction,  and  the  action  is 
checked  without  any  of  the  compensation  offered  by  the 
common  antithesis  of  the  fourth  act  of  a  Shakespearean 
drama.  The  interest  between  the  first  appearance  of  Old 
Mahon  in  the  second  act  and  his  discovery  of  the  run- 
away son  who  felled  him  with  a  loy  in  the  third  is  insuffi- 
ciently maintained.  In  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows  also,  where 


CtiAt>.  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  215 

we  are  carried  away  from  modern  Ireland,  the  action  is 
wanting  in  flexibility  and  impetus. 

Of  the  three-act  plays  the  early  Well  of  the  Saints  stands 
first  in  poetry,  in  beauty  of  form,  in  substantial  humanity 
and  in  the  truth  of  that  symbolism  which  reminds  us 
how  far  Synge  is  beyond  Maeterlinck  even  on  his  own 
ground.  In  the  first  act  we  see  Martin  Doul  and  his  wife, 
Mary,  two  blind  and  weather-beaten  beggars,  sitting  by 
the  wayside.  They  are  talking  together  of  the  joys  of 
sight,  and  Martin  falls  into  a  voluptuous  strain.  His  wife 
reproves  him  : 

"  Ah,  there's  a  power  of  villainy  walking  the  world, 
Martin  Doul,  among  them  that  do  be  gadding  around, 
with  their  gaping  eyes,  and  their  sweet  words,  and  they 
with  no  sense  in  them  at  all. 

"  MARTIN  DOUL  (sadly).  It's  the  truth,  maybe,  yet 
I'm  told  it's  a  grand  thing  to  see  a  young  girl  walking 
the  road." 

A  saint  with  a  can  of  holy  water  restores  sight  to  them, 
and  for  the  first  time  the  pair  who  were  happy  in  their 
blindness  and  "  day-long  blessed  idleness "  are  dis- 
illusioned. He  sees  his  wife  for  a  wrinkled  old  hag,  and 
she  sees  him  for  a  stumpy  and  ugly  old  man.  Further- 
more Martin  is  compelled  to  work  for  his  living  :  he  has 
no  blindness  to  bring  him  coppers  as  he  sits  idly  by  the 
roadside.  Fortunately  blindness  returns  upon  them,  and 
they  are  happy  till  they  hear  the  saint's  bell  coming  again 
their  way.  They  grope  hastily  for  hiding,  but  are  dis- 
covered and  dragged  before  the  saint,  who  offers  to  cure 
them  once  more.  Both  plead  piteously  to  be  spared  the 
curse  of  sight.  Blindness  is  better  Martin  knows  than  to 
open  one's  eyes  on  the  bleeding  feet  of  the  saint  "  and 
they  cut  with  stones,"  or  "  the  villainy  of  hell  "  looking 
out  from  the  eyes  of  a  girl.  The  old  man  grows  bitter  : 

"  And  wasn't  it  great  sights  I  seen  on  the  roads 
when  the  north  winds  would  be  driving,  and  the  skies 
would  be  harsh,  till  you'd  see  the  horses  and  the  asses, 
and  the  dogs  itself,  maybe,  with  their  heads  hanging, 
and  they  closing  their  eyes." 

But  when  he  and  Mary  were  blinded  : 


£ie    IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS    [PART  it 

"  It's  ourselves  had  finer  sights  than  the  like  of  them, 
I'm  telling  you,  when  we  were  sitting  a  while  back 
hearing  the  birds  and  bees  humming  in  every  weed 
of  the  ditch,  or  when  we'd  be  smelling  the  sweet, 
beautiful  smell  does  be  rising  in  the  warm  nights,  when 
you  do  be  hearing  the  swift  flying  things  racing  in  the 
air,  till  we'd  be  looking  up  in  our  own  minds  into  the 
grand  sky,  and  seeing  lakes  and  big  rivers,  and  fine 
hills  for  taking  the  plough." 

It  is  difficult  to  conceive  The  Well  of  the  Saints  bettered 
in  any  respect.  In  its  spiritual  insight,  its  psychology, 
its  humour,  its  dialogue,  its  allegory  which  yet  carries  no 
obtrusive  message,  it  is  the  greatest  thing  Synge  ever 
wrote. 

Flawless  also  is  the  human  pathos  of  the  one-act  Riders 
to  the  Sea.  Old  Maurya  has  lost  the  last  of  her  sons  hi 
the  sea ;  but  she  knows  that  "  no  man  at  all  can  be 
living  for  ever,  and  we  must  be  satisfied."  And  on  a 
slightly  lower  level  of  human  appeal  and  beauty  of  form 
may  be  placed  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen  and  The  Tinker's 
Wedding. 

"  A  drifting  silent  man  full  of  hidden  passion  " — in 
these  words  we  have  the  key  to  the  personality  of  Synge 
and  the  character  of  his  plays.  Impersonal,  brooding, 
humorous,  with  a  strange  twist  of  ironic  mysticism,  Synge 
is  the  one  writer  since  the  Elizabethan  age  of  England 
who  has  written  great  romantic  drama.  Wit,  humour, 
intellect  are  not  enough  to  satisfy  the  soul  of  man  ;  and 
the  many  failures  of  our  poets  to  write  plays  in  verse 
are  a  recognition  of  the  truth  that  great  drama,  which 
is  to  fill  the  soul  with  joy  and  exultation,  must  be  poetical. 
In  verse  Synge  had  no  power  ;  but  his  prose-plays  are 
in  their  conception  life  transfigured  by  poetry  ;  and  the 
style  he  made  unto  himself  has  a  cadence  and  rhythm 
which  communicates  all  the  pleasure  of  metre.  The  plays 
of  Synge  may  be  compared  to  the  novels  of  Mr.  Hardy. 
In  either  case  the  writer  has  raised  action  and  prose- 
narrative  to  the  plane  of  poetry  and  imbued  the  story  of 
rough  and  home-spun  lives  with  a  universal  symbolism ; 
for  Destiny,  as  conceived  by  the  tragic  poets  of  Greece, 
presides  over  the  unheeding  war  of  events. 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  217 

The  plays  of  Synge  dramatise  the  character  of  the 
western  Irishman ;  Lady  Gregory's  people  belong  to 
Clare  and  Galway  ;  but  Ireland  has  also  produced,  in  its 
different  provinces  and  counties,  younger  dramatists  who 
write  of  the  peasants  or  the  middle-class  folk  of  the  towns 
as  they  know  them  in  their  own  districts.  Mr.  Colum 
and  Mr.  William  Boyle  belong  to  the  midlands,  Mr. 
Lennox  Robinson  to  the  south,  Mr.  Mayne  and  Mr.  Ervine 
to  the  north.  Though  Ireland  is  a  small  country  she  not 
only  speaks  Gaelic  and  English,  but  English  in  several 
dialects,  and,  in  addition  to  the  grand  difference  between 
Protestant  Ulster  and  the  Catholic  South,  the  working- 
background  of  life  differs  largely  from  county  to  county. 
Mr.  Boyle  was  no  longer  a  young  man  when  he  was 
drawn  into  writing  for  the  Abbey  Theatre,  and  with  only 

one  play  has  he  won,  or  perhaps  deserved, 
William  Boyle,  success.  The  Building  Fund  (1905)  is 
b.  1853.  powerful  in  characterisation,  and  renders 

the  unattractive  background  of  the  tale 
strongly  and  realistically.  None  of  the  characters  wins 
our  sympathy,  but  with  striking  force  and  directness  the 
play  presents  a  picture  of  the  relationship  of  a  malicious 
and  miserly  mother  to  her  scheming  son  and  selfish  grand- 
daughter. Unfortunately  Mr.  Boyle  has  not  succeeded 
in  reaching  again  the  standard  he  set  himself  in  this  play. 
The  Eloquent  Dempsey  (1906),  a  satire  on  the  verbose 
insincerity  of  one  type  of  Irish  politician,  quickly  sinks 
into  broad  farce.  The  complicated  Mineral  Workers 
(1906)  is  a  loose  and  shapeless  piece  of  writing ;  and 
with  Family  Failings  (1912),  which  followed  after  a  break 
of  several  years,  Mr.  Boyle  was  unable  to  recover  his  lost 
ground. 

In  his  pictures  of  the  same  part  of  Ireland,  the  east 
and  midlands  which  have  been  transformed  by  the  long 

speaking  of  English,  by  newspapers  and 
Padraic  Colum.  by  schools,  Mr.  Colum  has  shown  greater 

dramatic  art  and  more  promise  for  the 
future.  The  Land,  which  was  produced  at  the  Abbey 
Theatre  in  1905,  is  a  comedy  upon  the  exaggerated 
veneration  of  old  Murtagh  Cosgar  for  the  land  he  has 
won  with  a  life's  toil,  and  his  disappointment  with  a  son 
who  refuses  to  be  coerced  into  a  like  religious  devotion 


218     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  « 

to  "  a  bit  of  land  and  a  house."  The  dialogue  of  the 
play  is  not  good,  and  the  humour  serves  no  special 
purpose  in  illuminating  character  ;  but  the  play  is  essen- 
tially Irish  in  its  emphasis  upon  the  Irishman's  passion 
for  the  ownership  of  a  strip  of  land,  however  poor.  Far 
better  in  workmanship  and  truth  to  the  individual  character 
is  The  Fiddler's  House  (1907).  In  this  play  love  of  the 
land  also  enters  as  part  of  the  plot  scheme.  Conn  Hourican, 
the  old  fiddler,  a  vagrant  of  the  roads,  has  settled  in  a 
cottage  with  his  two  daughters,  but  love  of  his  art  and 
the  Wanderlust  are  too  strong  for  him.  He  leaves  the 
house  to  his  younger  daughter,  who  is  to  be  married, 
and  takes  to  "  the  lasting  kindness  of  the  road  "  with 
his  elder  daughter.  Conn  is  admirably  drawn,  as  is  also 
the  gypsy  character  of  the  elder  daughter,  Maire.  The 
play  is  straightforward  and  strong  writing,  with  good 
conception  of  character.  In  1910  came  Thomas  Muskerry, 
the  story  of  a  workhouse  master,  which  illustrates  the 
drabness  and  dreary  confinement  of  life  in  a  small  Irish 
town.  A  larger  number  of  characters  is  introduced  than 
in  either  of  the  earlier  plays,  they  are  not  as  definitely 
portrayed,  no  character  reaches  the  level  of  Conn  or  Maire 
Hourican,  and  the  dialogue  tends  to  drag.  Mr.  Colum 
inclines  to  harshness  in  characterisation  ;  but  The  Fiddler's 
House  is  redeemed  by  a  strong  vein  of  romance,  and  for 
this  reason  it  is  by  far  the  best  and  most  human  of  his 
plays.  In  none  is  his  dialogue  invariably  true  to  character  ; 
but  Mr.  Colum  writes  with  style,  he  is  yet  young,  and  it 
is  probable  that  better  work  is  to  come  from  him. 

Mr.  Lennox  Robinson  comes  from  Cork,  his  Ireland  is 
of  the  south,  and  he  knows  the  people  of  town  and  country 

intimately  both  in  their  virtues  and 
Lennox  Robinson,  their  failings.  He  is  observant,  critical, 
b.  1886.  quick  to  note  shams,  and  his  pictures 

of  Irish  life  are  tinged  with  ironic 
satire,  but  not  with  contempt.  It  is  difficult  to  believe, 
however,  that  to  the  complacent  Irishman  Mr.  Robinson's 
plays  can  be  wholly  gratifying.  From  this  statement  may 
be  excepted  his  early  play,  The  Clancy  Name  (1908), 
which  turns  upon  the  unconvincing  plot-idea  of  a  man 
saving  the  reputation  of  the  Clancy  name  and  forestalling 
the  temptation  to  confess  himself  a  murderer  to  the 


CHAP,  v]        THE  IRISH  PLAYWRIGHTS  219 

authorities  by  committing  suicide.  For  an  immature  play 
this  is  remarkably  good  in  character-drawing  ;  but  its 
faithfulness  in  this  respect  is  negatived  by  the  extravagant 
and  sensational  theme.  The  Crossroads  (1909)  is  a  well- 
knit  play,  showing  powers  of  observation,  careful  work- 
manship and  a  fine  instinct  for  sharp  outline  in  sketching 
character.  Its  satire  upon  the  slovenly  inefficiency  of  the 
southern  Irish  farmer  and  the  deplorable  results  of  love- 
less marriages  arranged  by  parents  (a  common  practice 
among  the  Irish  peasantry)  is  uncompromising.  Mr. 
Robinson's  satire  in  this  and  the  two  succeeding  plays  is 
severe  because  he  is  in  earnest  and  wishes  well  to  his 
victims.  Harvest  (1910)  is  an  indictment,  perhaps  a  little 
unnecessary,  of  the  older  type  of  education  which  flourished 
in  the  Irish  villages.  Patriots  (1912),  with  more  point, 
mercilessly  satirises  sham  political  agitation  and  rhetorical 
patriotism  ;  in  force  and  truth  it  may  be  counted  with 
The  Crossroads  as  representing  the  best  Mr.  Robinson  has 
yet  given  us. 

With  Mr.   Robinson  may  be  named  another  realistic 
dramatist  of  southern  Ireland,  Mr.  T.  C.  Murray.     His 

Birthright  (1910)  touches  again  the  peren- 
T.  C.  Murray,  nial  Irish  theme — the  heritage  of  the  land 

b.  1873.  and  the  relationship  to  their  inheritance  of 

those  born  upon  it.  Maurice  Harte  (1912) 
brings  us  to  the  soul  of  Irish  Catholicism,  and  repre- 
sents the  tragedy  of  a  mother's  life  when  she  learns  that 
the  son  of  her  hope  can  never  be  a  priest. 

In  the  case  of  Mr.  Robinson  and  Mr.  Murray  it  is  clear 
that  the  romantic  and  poetic  drama,  which  it  was  the 

work  of  Mr.  Yeats,  Synge  and  Lady 
Rutherford  Mayne,  Gregory  to  restore  to  the  stage,  has 
b.  1878.  ceased  to  be  the  only  influence.  Save 

in  the  background  and  setting  of  the 
action  there  is  little  to  distinguish  their  work  from  the 
intellectual  and  realistic  drama  of  London  and  Berlin. 
The  criticism  applies  equally  to  the  ironic  and  slightly 
exaggerated  humour  of  Mr.  Rutherford  Mayne's  comedy, 
The  Drone  (1908),  and  to  his  tragedy,  The  Troth  (1908). 
In  Red  Turf  (1911),  on  the  other  hand,  he  deserts  the 
north,  which  is  his  real  country,  and  writes  a  poetic  drama 
of  Galway  avowedly  modelled  upon  the  style  of  Synge. 


220     IRISH  POETS  AND  PLAYWRIGHTS     [PART  n 

Mr.  St.  John  Ervine,  likewise,  another  Ulster  dramatist, 
is  the  realistic  painter  of  drab  and  sordid  scenes.  His 

character-drawing  is  admirably  clear- 
St.  John  Ervine,  cut,  but  Mixed  Marriage  (1911)  is  too 
b.  1883.  slight  and  brief  to  support  its  tragedy, 

which  is  founded  upon  fact — the  death 
of  a  girl  accidentally  shot  by  soldiers  during  Belfast  strike 
riots.  Jane  Clegg  (1913)  is  a  far  better  play,  combining 
admirably  elements  of  realism  and  excellent  humour, 
which  promise  well  for  Mr.  Ervine' s  future  development. 
But  the  play  has  nothing  to  do  with  Ireland. 

The  work  of  the  younger  dramatists  of  the  Abbey  and 
Ulster  Literary  Theatres  shows  that  the  world  has  been 
too  much  for  the  Celtic  Revival.  Already  the  movement 
has  learned  to  don  a  modish  garb,  to  think  the  thoughts 
and  speak  after  the  fashions  of  the  towns.  The  drama's 
need  of  joy  and  reality,  as  Synge  conceived  these  things, 
has  little  meaning  for  Mr.  Colum,  Mr.  Boyle,  Mr.  Robinson 
and  Mr.  Ervine.  For  reality  they  have  substituted  real- 
ism, for  joy  dispassionate  observation,  till  there  is  little 
that  is  essential  to  distinguish  their  plays  from  the  social 
drama  of  Hauptmann,  Schnitzler,  Mr.  Galsworthy  or  St. 
John  Hankin.  If  we  are  to  judge  their  drama  by  its 
aims  it  may  readily  be  admitted  that  several  of  these 
younger  dramatists  have  done  remarkably  good  work  and 
that  better  plays  may  well  be  expected  of  them.  But  the 
poetry,  the  romance,  the  mysticism,  the  brooding  passion, 
the  wistful  melancholy  of  Mr.  Yeats,  Lady  Gregory,  A.  E. 
and  Synge — where  are  these  ?  The  Abbey  Theatre  is 
the  outcome  of  a  well-defined  national  and  artistic  impulse, 
but  the  foster-mother  has  gathered  about  her  a  strange 
brood  of  ducklings,  for  her  latest  plays  are  not  more 
national  in  temper  or  Celtic  in  spirit  than  the  cosmopolitan 
drama  of  the  great  European  cities.  Their  colour  may 
be  local,  but  the  mood  of  the  authors  is  realistic,  satirical, 
detached.  The  death  of  Synge  in  1909  may  be  counted 
as  the  end  of  the  first  period  of  the  Abbey  Theatre's  work. 
The  second,  which  is  now  being  written,  has  but  little 
part  or  lot  with  the  first. 


LITERARY   AND   INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA 
IN   ENGLAND 


CHAPTER    I 

BEFORE    IBSEN 

T.  W.  Robertson — Oscar  VYilde — Sir  Arthur  Piuero — Henry  Arthur 
Jones — Sydney  Grundy — Charles  Haddou  Chambers — R.  C.  Carton — 
H.  V.  Esmond. 

BY  some  critics,  Professor  Saintsbury  among  them,  it  is 
asserted  that  the  connection  between  literature  and  the 
theatre  is,  in  the  main,  slight,  and  that  modern  drama  in 
particular  can  only  be  fruitfully  approached  from  the 
vantage-point  of  a  seat  in  the  stalls.  Even  the  buoyant 
optimism  of  Mr.  John  Palmer  can  only  lead  him  to  speak 
of  recent  developments  as  a  "  movement  which  has 
brought  the  English  theatre  within  measurable  distance 
of  an  alliance  with  English  letters."  A  nice  point  of 
distinction  is  often  involved  in  an  attempt  to  differentiate 
between  that  drama  which  bears  the  insignia  of  literature 
and  that  which  is  merely  of  the  stage  stagey  ;  but  dramatic 
writing  must  obviously  fall,  either  unquestionably  or  with 
qualification,  into  three  compartments — that  in  which  the 
author  thinks  primarily  of  histrionic  effect,  that  in  which 
he  is  first  a  man  of  letters,  and  lastly  into  the  class  of 
enduring  drama  in  which  literary  and  theatrical  expres- 
sion are  met  together  as  brother  and  sister.  The  best  kind 
of  drama  is  that  which  gives  its  proper  pleasure  and  has 
its  separate  yet  consonant  value  whether  as  read  or  acted  ; 
and,  thus  regarded,  English  drama  has  enjoyed  three 
literary  periods,  the  Elizabethan,  the  Caroline  and  the 
Georgian,  by  which  last  is  intended  the  comedy  of  Gold- 
smith and  Sheridan.  During  the  greater  part  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  the  play  that  could  be  acted  and  read, 
one  and  the  other,  without  loss  in  either  case,  was  a 
phenomenon  not  to  be  found.  In  its  last  quarter,  how- 
ever, the  stigma  was  removed  by  the  wit  of  Oscar  Wilde, 
and  a  little  later  foreign  influences,  chiefly  coming  by  the 

223 


224  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

way  of  Ibsen,  set  a  style  and  a  form  for  younger  writers 
with  ideas  and  gifts  of  expression — St.  John  Hankin,  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw,  Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  Granville  Barker  and 
Stanley  Houghton  among  them.  The  plays  of  these 
writers  depend  upon  matter,  form  and  expression,  not 
upon  the  producer  or  the  actor,  and  they  have  therefore 
a  literary  quality  which  may  be  enhanced  but  cannot 
be  changed  by  the  theatre.  The  matter  and  the  expres- 
sion of  Shakespeare,  Wycherley  and  Sheridan  makes  them 
masters  not  servants  of  the  stage,  and,  in  a  like  but  far 
weaker  degree,  literary  expression  has  in  these  latter  days 
made  some  part  of  dramatic  writing  independent  of  the 
theatrical  manager  and  his  company.  Shakespeare,  how- 
ever produced,  would  still  have  something  left  to  him  ; 
and  no  acting  could  wholly  destroy  the  wit  of  Lady 
Windermere 's  Fan  or  How  He  Lied  to  Her  Husband. 

Three  literary  periods  in  the  story  of  English  drama 
have  been  noted,  and  of  these  only  one  is  poetical.  The 
world's  great  drama  is  and  must  always  be  clothed  in 
poetry — Ibsen  the  protagonist  of  bald  prose  is  only  truly 
great  in  Brand  and  Peer  Gynt — but  in  England  since  the 
age  of  Shakespeare  poetical  drama  has  come  far  short 
of  victory.  The  greater  and  the  lesser  poets  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  essayed  poetic  drama,  and  none  with 
entire  fulfilment  of  his  intention.  Shelley  and  Beddoes 
have  left  behind  them  the  greatest  dramatic  poetry  of 
the  century,  but  The  Cenci  (1819)  for  plain  reasons  is  not 
for  the  stage,  and  Death's  Jest  Book  (1850)  is  splendidly 
imaginative  dramatic  poetry  without  coherence  or  plot. 
Others — Sheridan  Knowles,  Bulwer  Lytton,  Sir  Henry 
Taylor, — in  the  earlier  half  of  that  century,  were  not  with- 
out power,  but  their  work  in  poetic  drama  is  now  chiefly 
of  interest  to  the  student.  Tennyson,  certainly,  was  not 
at  his  best  in  drama,  though  this  part  of  his  work  has  been 
thoughtlessly  belittled,  for  Becket  (1884)  and  The  Cup 
(1884)  possessed  a  strong  dramatic  quality,  and  his  plays 
showed  that  he  could  make  to  live  again  the  story  of  the 
past.  Browning's  instinct  for  the  dramatic  rendering  of 
life  stopped  short  with  the  monologue,  save  for  A  Blot 
in  the  Scutcheon  (1843),  in  which  he  succeeded  in  weaving 
his  speeches  into  genuine  dialogue  and  combining  that 
dialogue  with  dramatic  action,  albeit  action  a  little  pre- 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  225 

posterous.  Swinburne's  experiments  with  historic  drama 
in  Chastelard  (1865),  Bothwell  (1874)  and  Mary  Stuart 
(1881)  were  fated  to  failure  in  the  case  of  a  poet  whose 
genius  was  purely  lyrical  and  ill-adapted  to  the  compre- 
hension of  individual  character.  The  partial  successes  of 
these  poets  serve  only  to  throw  into  higher  relief  the 
general  inability  to  create  again  in  England  poetic  drama. 
The  more  recent  attempts  of  Stephen  Phillips  equally 
belong  to  the  story  of  poetry  not  drama,  for  he  did 
nothing  to  give  to  dramatic  writing  a  new  meaning  and 
a  new  impulse. 

But  if  the  drama  of  poetry  has  failed  the  drama  of 
prose    has    achieved    latterly    a    literary    quality   which 

has  been  much  to  seek  throughout 
T.  W.  Robertson,  several  generations  of  writers.  A  new 
1829-1871  spirit  came  first  with  Oscar  Wilde, 

who  owed  his  inspiration  chiefly  to  his 
native  wit,  and  after  to  Sheridan  and  French  models. 
But  Wilde  left  no  successor,  and  the  strongest  influence 
upon  original  English  drama  within  the  last  quarter  of 
a  century  has  come  through  the  realistic  and  intellectual 
drama  of  Ibsen,  Hauptmann  and  Schnitzler,  till  this  type 
of  dreary  realism  found  its  culmination  in  the  aridity  of 
Mr.  Galsworthy.  Before  this  manifest  change  there  had 
been,  it  is  true,  a  moving  among  the  dry  bones,  which 
may  be  accounted  a  reaction,  in  weariness  and  disgust, 
against  the  long-drawn  age  of  adaptation  from  the  French. 
The  removal  in  1843  of  a  monopoly  in  the  production  of 
legitimate  drama  granted  to  Drury  Lane  and  Covent 
Garden  led  to  a  rapid  increase  in  the  number  of  theatres 
and  a  demand  for  new  plays,  a  demand  which  was  met 
for  nearly  forty  years  by  adaptation  from  the  French, 
an  art  in  which  Sydney  Grundy,  only  recently  dead,  was 
peculiarly  proficient.  During  this  period  original  English 
drama  ceased  to  exist.  In  acted  comedy  T.  W.  Robertson 
is  commonly  noted  as  the  inaugurator  of  a  new  drama  of 
real  life  ;  and  after  the  reign  of  borrowed  melodrama 
and  farce  his  plays  have,  at  least,  the  merit  of  individuality. 
The  son  of  a  provincial  actor  Robertson  knew  the  stage 
from  childhood.  For  many  years  he  led  a  wandering 
and  troubled  life,  not  often  eating  well  or  dressing  finely, 
supporting  himself  without  great  success  by  writing  for 
Q 


226  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

the  magazines  and  the  stage.  He  first  reaped  the  reward 
of  his  labours  and  trials  with  Society  (1865).  This  was 
the  beginning  not  only  of  his  success  but  that  of  the 
Bancrofts  and  the  little  Prince  of  Wales's  Theatre.  Society 
was  quickly  followed  by  Ours  (1866),  Caste  (1867),  School 
(1869)  and  other  plays  which  were  ridiculed  as  "  cup-and- 
saucer  "  comedy.  The  realism  of  Robertson  to  his  own 
age  appeared  absurd  ;  to  us  it  is  artificial ;  for  his  know- 
ledge of  life  was  almost  entirely  limited  to  the  world  of 
Bohemia  where  he  had  been  born  ;  outside  that  region 
he  guesses  and  guesses  wrongly.  His  psychology  is  no 
more  than  the  emphasis  of  one  or  two  dominant  traits 
in  a  character  ;  and  his  dialogue  is  largely  modelled  to 
amuse  by  swiftness  and  repartee  rather  than  to  give  the 
illusion  of  the  monotonous  round.  Nevertheless  in  con- 
trast with  the  drama  that  went  before  Robertson  was  a 
true  innovator,  a  simple  man  who  looked  sincerely  at  life 
and  attempted  to  render  the  English  world  he  saw. 

The  plays  of  Robertson  were  as  a  prophesying  in  the 
wilderness.  But  after  him  original  English  drama  was 
slow  in  coming.  During  the  'seventies  Irving  rose  to 
fame  as  an  actor  ;  but  as  a  manager  he  has  hardly  any 
importance  save  as  a  producer  of  Tennyson's  plays.  The 
Bancrofts,  after  the  death  of  Robertson,  fell  back  upon 
English  classics  and  translations  from  the  French,  and 
the  faint  promise  of  a  new  English  comedy  seemed  to  die 
without  fulfilment.  Even  in  the  following  decade  Gilbert, 
the  brilliantly  gifted  writer  of  fantasies,  H.  J.  Byron, 
Tom  Taylor  and  Charles  Reade  all  produced  adaptations 
from  the  French.  Nevertheless,  about  this  time,  despite 
a  temporary  obscuration,  a  change  was  afoot.  First, 
Wilde  set  a  new  example  in  the  writing  of  comedy, 
brilliant,  paradoxical,  self-conscious,  for  after  him  it  was 
impossible  for  any  young  writer  to  fall  back  upon  the 
stereotyped  theatrical  manner,  and,  secondly,  came  the 
overpowering  influence  of  Ibsen,  which  is  still,  if  less 
forcibly,  working  its  will  upon  English  drama.  These 
new  impulses  were  virtually  synchronous. 

In  a  sense  the  influence  of  Wilde's  comedies  has  been 
greater  than  their  deserts.  As  drama  they  are  a  diploma 
example  of  the  wreck  of  art  upon  theory.  And  this 
Wilde  had  the  wit  to  see,  for  he  admitted  that  his 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  227 

plays  were  not  good.  In  stagecraft  they  are  weak,  though 
written  at  a  time  when  Wilde  might  have  learned  of 
Ibsen  ;  and  they  contain  little  true  char- 
Oscar  Wilde,  acter-drawing,  for  epigram  is  distributed 
1856-1900.  indiscriminately  to  all  the  characters.  The 

practice  at  its  worst  is  well  illustrated  in  the 
third  act  of  Lady  Windermeres  Fan  (1892).  The  scintilla- 
tion of  epigram  between  the  four  men  who  are  talking  in 
Lord  Darlington's  rooms  is  like  nothing  so  much  as  an 
accident  among  fireworks.  On  the  whole,  however,  this 
is  the  most  human  of  Wilde's  plays.  The  figures  of  Lord 
Windermere  and  Mrs.  Erlynne  have  greater  verisimilitude 
than  have  most  of  his  types.  The  Importance  of  Being 
Earnest  (1895)  is  brilliant  and  actable,  but  all  the  characters 
are  puppets.  A  Woman  of  No  Importance  (1893)  illustrates 
Wilde's  contempt  for  or  ignorance  of  stagecraft.  The 
longueurs  of  the  dialogue  lead  up  lamely  and  haltingly, 
without  pretence  of  dramatic  action,  to  the  crisis.  An 
Ideal  Husband  (1895),  with  its  theme — the  honoured 
public  servant  who  discovers  that  his  youthful  crime  is 
about  to  be  divulged — is  more  dramatic  ;  but  the  plot 
is  ill-conducted  and  even  the  saving  grace  of  brilliance 
has  largely  departed  from  this  play  which  was  being  per- 
formed at  the  time  of  Wilde's  downfall. 

Wilde's  comedies  held  London  spellbound  and  brought 
the  author  wealth  and  fame.  They  can  always  be  played, 
just  as  Sheridan  is  always  actable,  but  in  neither  case 
have  we  great  comedy.  The  humour  of  these  intellectual 
comedies  lies  in  inessentials.  Wilde  held  that  men  and 
women  differ  from  each  other  only  in  accidents  ;  and  in 
this  belief  his  comedies  were  written.  The  truth  is  con- 
versely that  accidents  may  vary  in  time  and  place,  while 
in  any  given  time  and  place  they  are  approximately  the 
same  for  all,  but  that  the  character  of  individual  men  and 
women  is  outside  time  and  place  and  their  own  control — 
and  in  this  region  lies  the  source  of  drama.  Wilde's  plays 
are  based  upon  a  shallow  theory,  and  his  character- 
drawing  is  therefore  negligible.  Nevertheless,  for  what 
they  were,  his  comedies  worked  a  great  change,  for  Wilde 
wrote  in  spoken  English  and  not  the  jargon  of  the  stage. 
Furthermore  his  puppets,  though  their  relationship  with 
the  living  type  was  often  slight,  were  no  marionettes  of 


228  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

the  theatre,  they  represented  an  individual  reading  of  the 
social  world.  Wilde's  comedies,  with  all  their  faults,  were 
native  to  himself,  sincere  in  a  perverse  way,  and  they  had 
their  effect  in  abolishing  the  comedy  manufactured  by  rote. 

More  important  by  far  was  the  gradual  mastery  of 
Ibsen.  In  the  early  'seventies  Mr.  Gosse  introduced  him 
to  England,  explained  his  plays  and  the  greatness  and 
significance  of  his  genius  ;  but  it  was  to  the  ordinary 
reader  and  to  the  man  of  letters,  not  to  the  theatre,  that 
Mr.  Gosse  offered  his  introduction.  Translations  of  his 
plays  began  to  appear,  yet  in  this  country  he  remained 
a  name  and  little  more  for  another  twenty  years.  Before 
the  end  of  these  years  Mr.  Archer  did  battle  for  Ibsen ; 
the  Independent  Theatre  played  him :  and  at  last 
in  1893  no  less  than  six  of  his  plays  were  produced  in 
London.  The  year  may  be  taken  to  date  a  new  stage 
in  the  story  of  English  drama.  Ibsen's  influence  is  chiefly 
significant  of  three  things — a  simpler  and  more  direct 
stagecraft,  an  unreasoning  worship  of  the  baldest  prose 
and  a  drab  representation  of  life's  monotony,  and  an 
intellectual  revolt  against  the  accepted  in  ethics  and 
religion.  In  individual  dramatists  this  influence  took  its 
separate  courses,  but  by  nearly  all  romance  was  shunned, 
and  the  play  became  realistic,  intellectual,  busied  with 
the  latest  and  most  modern  topics,  and  sometimes  tangled 
with  entirely  undramatic  psychological  intricacies.  Chief 
among  writers  of  the  new  order  were  and  are  St.  John 
Hankin,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  Mase- 
field,  Mr.  Granville  Barker,  Stanley  Houghton  ;  and  at  a 
slight  remove  other  and  more  derivative  writers  such  as 
Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  Mr.  Somerset  Maugham,  Mr.  Gilbert 
Cannan,  Miss  Githa  Sowerby,  Mr.  B.  M.  Hastings  and, 
in  part,  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie  are  to  be  placed. 

Even  the  older  and  established  writers  fell  into  line 
with  the  new  movement.  Modifications  in  the  manner 
of  writing  of  Sir  Arthur  Pinero,  Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones 
and  Sydney  Grundy  are  indicative  of  the  change  which 
was  coming  over  the  face  of  the  theatrical  world.  The 
substance  of  their  plays  is  of  an  earlier  time,  but,  and 
this  is  especially  true  of  Sir  Arthur  Pinero,  they  have  so 
successfully  touched  up  the  older  melodrama,  sensa- 
tionalism, sentimentalism,  romance  with  a  new  veneer  of 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  229 

realism  that  they  have  succeeded  in  retaining  popularity 
with  audiences  who  were  becoming  accustomed  to  the 
intellectual  drama. 

To  regard  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  as  the  author  of  problem 
plays  is  to  do  him  an  injustice.  In  some  of  his  plays  he 
has  embraced,  against  his  will,  the  attitude  of  the  social 
philosopher  ;  but  his  main  intent  appears  to  have  been 
the  provision  of  an  entertaining  drama  creditably  modelled 
to  the  requirements  of  the  stage.  He  has  not,  like  Mr. 
Henry  Arthur  Jones,  delivered  impassioned  hortations 
upon  the  need  of  a  National  Theatre  and  a  drama  which 
offers  mystery  and  imagination.  His  dialogue  is  neat, 
the  interplay  between  the  characters  is  rapid,  the  action 
moves  unflaggingly,  the  characters  are  sufficiently  pro- 
nounced to  hold  the  attention  of  the  average  audience, 
but  there  is  no  attempt  to  treat  them  with  the  hyper- 
psychology  of  Mr.  Barker  or  Mr.  Galsworthy.  In  a  word 
Sir  Arthur  Pinero  is  an  excellent  playwright,  but  there  is 
nothing  in  his  Theatre  to  justify  the  inclusion  of  his  name 
with  dramatists  who  are  something  more  than  competent 
society  entertainers. 

Sir  Arthur  Pinero  readily  changes  his  manner,  and  his 
plays,  therefore,  as  readily  fall  into  classes.  It  has  been 
his  attempt  to  raise  farce  to  the  position 
Sir  Arthur  Wing  of  comedy,  but  it  cannot  be  said  that 
Pinero,  b.  1855.  his  intention  has  been  wholly  crowned 
with  success  in  The  Magistrate  (1883), 
The  Schoolmistress  (1886),  Dandy  Dick  (1887),  The  Amazons 
(1893)  or  the  later  Mind  the  Paint  Girl  (1912),  which  are 
good  of  their  kind,  though  they  illustrate  the  need  in 
farce  of  more  zest  in  living  than  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  can 
supply.  His  most  characteristic  drama,  and  that  un- 
doubtedly nearest  his  heart,  is  to  be  found  in  the  plays 
of  humour  and  graceful  sentiment,  Sweet  Lavender  (1888), 
The  Weaker  Sex  (1889)  and  Trelawny  of  the  Wells  (1899). 
The  wholly  artificial  plot  of  Sweet  Lavender  and  its 
embroidery  of  pretty  sentiment  made  the  play  a  con- 
spicuous success.  It  ran  for  almost  two  years,  was 
frequently  revived,  played  all  over  the  provinces  and 
translated  into  several  European  tongues.  Trelawny  of 
the  Wells,  though  less  a  success,  owed  its  qualified  popularity 
to  a  like  weaving  of  artifice  and  sentiment.  These  plays 


280  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  rm 

fulfil  their  intention  :  but  they  have  exercised  no  influence 
upon  the  development  of  true  comedy. 

If  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  serious  force 
in  English  drama  he  is'to  be  judged  by  his  problem  plays. 
The  first  of  these,  The  Squire  (1881),  is  lacking  even  in 
good  stagecraft,  and  the  theme  is  stultified  by  a  meaning- 
less solution.  A  young  couple  marry  only  to  find  that 
the  first  wife  is  living.  The  troublesome  first  wife  is 
removed  by  death  ;  and  so  the  knot  is  cut,  leaving  the 
problem  where  it  was  before.  The  Profligate  (1889), 
which  turns  upon  the  old  story  of  the  woman  who  marries 
the  rake  in  place  of  the  virtuous  lover,  is  similarly  solved 
by  the  death  of  the  profligate  ;  and  all  things  remain 
as  they  were,  for  the  ordeal  is  removed,  not  endured. 
But  these,  though  more  serious  in  intention  than  Sir 
Arthur  Pinero's  earlier  plays,  are,  in  their  class,  secondary 
to  The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray  (1893)  and  The  Notorious 
Mrs.  Ebbsmith  (1895),  which  were  written  to  meet  the 
new  craving  for  realistic  problem  plays  aroused  by  the 
advent  of  Ibsen  in  England.  In  the  earlier  play  of  the 
two  Aubrey  Tanqueray  marries  Paula,  well  aware  that 
she  is  a  woman  equipped  with  a  past,  in  the  hope  that 
the  past  may  be  forgotten  and  the  future  irradiated  with 
blissful  love.  Perhaps  the  best  feature  of  the  play  is 
that  the  development  of  the  tragedy,  as  always  in  life, 
is  based  upon  a  complexity  of  concurring  causes  ;  but, 
as  in  The  Profligate,  so  again  the  author  misses  his  road 
and  takes  a  wrong  turning.  The  spring  of  the  disaster, 
ending  in  Paula's  suicide,  lies  neither  in  the  past  nor 
in  her  character,  but  dramatically  in  the  mistaken 
drawing  of  Aubrey.  The  man  who  chose  to  marry 
Paula  with  open  eyes  could  not  be  the  pompous  and 
chilly  individual  of  the  last  three  acts.  A  reasonably 
generous  attitude  on  his  part  would  have  saved  Paula. 
Her  circumstances  are  so  peculiar  that  the  moral  of  the 
play  is  lost.  If  The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebbsmith  betrays  the 
gradually  increasing  influence  of  Ibsen,  it  lies  not  in  better 
construction,  but  rather  in  the  character  of  Agnes,  who 
shows  traces  of  Ibsen's  Agnes,  Rita,  Ellida  and  Rebecca, 
while  Lucas  Cleeve  is  comparable  to  the  dull  and  con- 
ventional type  of  man  marked  by  Tesman  and  Helmer. 
Again  as  a  problem  play  this  goes  astray.  Had  Lucas 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  231 

been  a  normal  man  there  was  no  reason  why  his  union 
with  Mrs.  Ebbsmith  should  not  have  been  happy.  He 
is  not.  Now  abnormalities  find  their  way  into  the  police 
court ;  the  essential  problems  of  life  belong  to  all  men, 
and  thus  to  art  and  religion.  Sir  Arthur  Pinero's  problem 
plays  rest  on  unlikely  conditions  and  improbable  solutions  ; 
and  thus  their  moral  significance  is  lost.  The  Shake- 
spearean treatment  of  knotty  ethical  points  is  full- 
blooded  :  this  is  skinny  and  worn. 

Sir  Arthur  Pinero's  later  plays,  such  as  The  Gay  Lord 
Quex  (1899),  Iris  (1901),  Letty  (1903)  and  His  House  in 
Order  (1906)  are  examples  of  good  construction.  They 
present  manners  rather  than  problems,  and  without  any 
marked  distinction  in  treatment.  They  are  the  work 
of  an  accomplished  playwright  who  understands  the 
limitations  of  stage  production  ;  and,  therefore,  though 
eminently  actable,  their  literary  quality  is  slight,  and 
their  influence  upon  the  work  of  others  is  negligible. 

It  is  not  Sir  Arthur  Pinero's  fault  nor  a  ground  of 
contrition  that  he  has  survived  his  age  ;  but  it  may  be 
a  cause  of  regret  that  his  work  is  almost  entirely  without 
the  personal  note  which  sometimes  distinguishes  the 
writing  of  even  those  lesser  dramatists,  who,  likewise,  have 
no  influence  upon  the  development  of  drama.  An  extreme 
sensitiveness  to  the  vagaries  of  public  taste  and  fashion 
has  ruled  his  method  of  composition.  He  is  an  admirable 
story-teller,  and  the  stage  has  been  for  him  the  means  of 
presenting  good  stories  well  told.  In  this  art  he  has 
rarely  failed.  That  he  fails  as  a  student  of  character, 
that  he  never  carries  any  play  of  serious  intention,  if 
Iris  be  excepted,  to  a  convincing  denouement,  militates 
not  at  all  against  his  plays  considered  as  exercises  in  the 
art  of  story-telling.  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  is  for  the  stage 
what  the  good  tale-writer  is  for  the  monthly  magazine. 
If  he  writes  farce  or  sentiment  he  entertains  and  pleases, 
if  he  writes  more  serious  drama  he  holds  the  attention, 
though  he  may  fail  to  command  the  assent  of  the  imagina- 
tion ;  for  he  cannot  make  us  feel  that  drama  concerns 
the  life  of  the  race  more  than  the  life  of  the  individual. 
Paula  Tanqueray  and  Mrs.  Ebbsmith  remain  individuals. 
Synge  cannot  tell  a  story  as  clearly  as  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  ; 
but  he  can  say  much  more  that  is  important. 


232  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

Despite  these  limitations  his  drama  is  not  the  product 
of  the  study,  for  he  draws  upon  life  :  and  from  life  only 
with  greater  consistency  than  Ibsen.  He  is,  however, 
restricted  by  the  want  of  a  large  imagination  and  his 
slender  equipment  as  a  psychologist.  Within  a  certain 
range  he  understands  individual  character ;  beyond  that 
range  he  uses  the  sighting  of  an  admirable  stagecraft, 
and,  thus,  the  further  his  range  the  less  certain  he  is  to 
reach  his  mark.  His  mind  is  practical  rather  than 
imaginative  ;  his  themes,  therefore,  are  direct  and  prosaic, 
sometimes  pleasantly  sentimental  but  never  poetic.  All 
his  work  is  self-conscious  ;  in  construction  often  nearly 
impeccable,  in  dialogue  swift  and  decisive,  in  characterisa- 
tion not  glaringly  bad.  But  the  whole  drama  of  Sir 
Arthur  Pinero  stands  for  no  significant  fact.  It  is  an 
excellent  mirror  of  changes  in  public  taste. 

And  Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones,  although  his  art  is  more 
personal  and  individual,  likewise  posits  nothing  that  is 
deeply-founded.  He  has  consistently 
Henry  Arthur  preached  a  serious  intention ;  and  in 
Jones,  b.  1851.  innumerable  lectures  and  essays  he  has 
expounded  his  aims.  He  refuses  to 
regard  the  drama  only  as  a  means  of  popular  amusement, 
although  he  recognises  that  it  can  instruct  but  incidentally  ; 
he  claims  the  right  to  portray  all  aspects  of  life  ;  and  he  is 
resolved  to  combat  modern  pessimistic  realism  by  "  the 
representation  of  the  more  imaginative  and  mysterious 
aspects  of  human  life." 

It  is  no  disparagement  of  Mr.  Jones  to  say  that  his 
performance  is  less  than  his  ideal.  This  is  the  fate  of  all 
save  those  who  are  of  no  account.  But  in  his  drama  it  is 
difficult  to  perceive  wherein  lies  that  quality  of  his  art 
which  tends  to  the  fulfilment  of  his  ideals.  There  is  no 
largeness  in  his  outlook,  and,  despite  his  pretensions  to 
reveal  the  spiritual  and  mysterious,  a  strain  of  the  common- 
place runs  through  all  his  work.  His  first  popular  piece, 
The  Silver  King  (1882),  made  no  profession  to  be  other 
than  melodrama,  and  by  this  we  are  not  justified  in 
judging  the  author.  Liberated  by  the  success  of  the  play 
he  turned  to  please  himself  in  Saints  and  Sinners  (1884), 
a  picture  of  middle-class  life  and  religion  in  a  country 
town,  which,  for  reasons  difficult  now  to  discover,  excited 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  283 

public  protest  against  the  representation  of  religion  on 
the  stage.  In  itself  the  play  labours  under  the  faults  of 
the  time  in  which  it  was  written — it  is  melodramatic  to  a 
degree — Letty  is  the  sweet  heroine,  happily  saved  from 
ruin  by  the  dear  old  father  ;  Captain  Fanshawe  is  as 
conventional  a  villain  as  ever  strode  upon  the  boards; 
George  Kingsmill,  the  stalwart  and  true  lover,  is  a  bad 
edition  of  Adam  Bede,  and  Fanshawe  is  a  meagre  copy 
of  Donnithorne.  Adventitious  aids  in  the  shape  of  coin- 
cidence, soliloquies,  the  reappearance  of  long-lost  persons 
to  save  or  ruin  the  situation,  are  freely  employed.  And 
it  is  difficult  to  discover  the  motive  of  the  play.  In  the 
acted  version  George,  the  true  lover,  and  Letty,  the 
fallen  girl,  are  happily  united  ;  in  the  printed  version 
Letty  dies.  In  either  case  the  mistake  is  one  that  Sir 
Arthur  Pinero  would  likewise  have  followed.  We  are 
only  faced  with  a  moral  problem  of  difficulty  if  Letty 
lives.  Mr.  Jones  is  no  more  able  to  clinch  his  play  than 
Oliver  Goldsmith  his  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  of  which  Saints 
and  Sinners  is  surely  a  modern  version.  Goldsmith, 
however,  saves  a  story  intolerably  melodramatic  in  plot 
by  a  felicitous  humour  in  characterisation  in  which  Mr. 
Jones  is  sadly  to  seek. 

After  this,  even  on  Mr.  Jones's  admission,  we  have  a 
relapse  into  melodrama,  till  we  emerge  again  with  The 
Middleman  (1889).  The  object  of  the  play  is  to  satirise 
the  stupid  and  blundering  middleman  of  capital  who 
exploits  the  brains  of  the  inventor.  Unfortunately  for 
the  gift  of  satire  Mr.  Jones  possesses  he  only  excites  our 
commiseration  for  the  middleman  who  sinks  into  a  con- 
dition of  pitiable  indigence.  Judah  (1890),  extravagantly 
praised  on  its  first  appearance,  is  an  even  more  incon- 
clusive problem  play.  The  Case  of  Rebellious  Sitsan  (1894) 
is  serious  comedy  treating  the  theme  of  the  unlovely 
marriage-tie  and  a  play  patently  infected  by  the  new 
demand  for  realism  created  by  the  drama  of  Ibsen.  In 
these  years  Mr.  Jones  gave  evidence  of  a  continuous 
tendency  to  divest  himself  of  the  melodramatic  instinct 
acquired  in  youth  and  to  advance  toward  a  greater  reality. 
His  finest  example  of  the  intellectual  play  of  serious 
import  is  Mrs.  Dane's  Defence  (1900).  An  element  of  the 
artificial  is  still  present,  but  the  treatment  of  character 


234  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

is  infinitely  more  true  to  life  than  it  had  been  in  the 
earlier  plays.  Mrs.  Dane  hides  her  past :  it  is  discovered 
by  a  few  though  she  is  cleared  in  the  eyes  of  the  many ; 
yet  in  the  moment  which  is  virtual  victory  for  her  the 
best  in  her  nature  triumphs,  and  she  surrenders  her  chance 
of  happiness  with  the  youth  who  would  marry  her  for 
his  sake  and  for  his  career.  The  plot  is  developed  with 
swiftness  and  stagecraft  almost  equal  to  Sir  Arthur  Pinero 
at  his  best ;  but,  unfortunately,  Mr.  Jones  succeeded  in 
ruining  the  conclusion  with  a  ridiculous  little  twist  in 
the  unnecessary  engagement  of  two  elderly  characters 
of  the  play.  The  whole  ought  to  have  concluded  with 
Mrs.  Dane's  exit  at  the  window,  when  she  goes  back  to 
her  past  and  her  child.  In  none  of  the  more  serious  plays 
which  followed — Chance,  the  Idol  (1902),  White-washing 
Julia  (1903)  or  Joseph  Entangled  (1904) — did  Mr.  Jones 
rival  the  measure  of  truth  and  reality  with  which  he 
had  invested  the  story  of  Mrs.  Dane.  Mrs.  Dane's  Defence 
stands  for  his  highest  reach  in  significant  and  serious 
drama. 

The  plays  of  Mr.  Jones,  if  more  individual,  are  more 
rough-hewn  than  those  of  Sir  Arthur  Pinero.  Even  Mrs. 
Dane's  Defence,  which  marks  an  advance  on  his  ordinary 
workmanship,  blunders  when  placed  by  the  side  of  The 
Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray  and  The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebb- 
smith.  Mr.  Jones  has  little  sense  of  form  ;  and  this  defect 
is  as  apparent  in  his  lectures  and  his  essays  as  in  his  plays. 
Nevertheless  he  possesses  imagination  and  ideas,  and 
herein  is  manifestly  the  superior  of  Sir  Arthur  Pinero, 
who  is  almost  wholly  derivative.  His  mind  is  more  full, 
but  he  is  by  no  means  as  clearly  articulate.  Nor,  again, 
though  he  has  defended  the  possibility  of  literary  drama 
against  Bagehot  and  other  detractors,  has  he  a  finely 
developed  literary  sense.  In  exactness  his  dialogue  is 
wanting  ;  his  construction,  even  judging  by  the  standard 
of  effective  melodrama,  is  frequently  insecure  ;  his  humour 
is  forced  ;  and  if  he  has  a  larger  sympathy  than  Sir  Arthur 
Pinero  with  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  his  pathos, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  hard  and  metallic.  It  was  his  mis- 
fortune to  be  born  at  a  time  when  English  drama  laboured 
under  the  obsession  of  French  writers  and  suffered  especially 
from  the  artifices  of  Scribe.  It  is,  at  least,  to  the  credit 


CHAP,  i]  BEFORE  IBSEN  235 

of  Mr.  Jones  that  he  was,  even  as  a  raw  young  dramatist, 
fully  cognisant  of  the  deplorable  condition  of  contem- 
porary drama.  He  saw  what  was  needed,  but  his  powers 
were  unequal  to  providing  a  true  remedy.  The  work  of 
Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones  and  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  is  typical 
of  a  transitional  period  when  men  are  groping  their  way, 
not  fully  aware  of  the  nature  of  the  object  they  seek. 
And  before  either  dramatist  had  fully  mastered  the  use 
of  his  instruments  his  efforts  were  supplanted  by  the 
new  drama  which  came  from  Norway,  a  land  hitherto 
unsuspected  in  the  playwright's  geography.  After  a  few 
years  in  which  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  and  Mr.  Jones  attempted 
to  adapt  their  methods  to  the  new  style,  they  were  content 
to  drop  back  into  the  older  manner  and  write  unblushingly 
theatrical  farces. 

As  an  original  dramatist  Sydney  Grundy  was  of  less 
note.      He   was   not   only   out   of  sympathy   with   later 

tendencies  in  drama,  he  also  never  out- 
Sydney  Grundy,  grew  the  technique  he  learned  from 
1848-1914.  Scribe  and  Labiche.  His  original  plays, 

even  the  best — A  Fool's  Paradise  (1889), 
Sowing  the  Wind  (1893)  and  The  Greatest  of  These  (1896) 
— too  obviously  laboured  under  French  influences  and 
showed  little  that  was  distinctive  or  individual.  He  is 
rather  to  be  remembered  by  his  adaptations.  Of  these 
the  most  successful  was  A  Pair  of  Spectacles  (1890)  based 
on  Les  Petits  Oiseaux  of  Labiche  and  Delacour.  This  and 
his  many  other  adaptations  illustrate  his  deftness  and 
skill,  but  they  have  no  place  in  the  history  of  the  develop- 
ment of  drama. 

And  it  is  only  necessary  here  to  dismiss  with  a  brief 
notice  two  or  three  other  writers  of  unambitious  comedy 

and  farce  who  have  for  a  number  of 
Charles  Eaddon  years  retained  their  popularity.  Mr. 
Chambers,  b.  1860.  Charles  Haddon  Chambers'  Captain  Swift 

(1888)  won  a  great  success.  The  sensa- 
tionalism of  the  stage  story  of  the  bushranger  who  tries 
to  take  a  place  in  English  society  on  a  return  to  the  home- 
country  and  failing  shoots  himself,  may  in  part  account 
for  the  favour  with  which  the  play  met.  The  Idler  (1891) 
was  an  equally  melodramatic  piece.  In  comedy,  The 
Tyranny  of  Tears  (1899),  for  example,  Mr.  Chambers 


286  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  [PART  ra 

shows  no  peculiar  ability.  Nor  do  his  later  plays,  from 
The  Awakening  (1901)  to  Passers-by  (1911),  reveal  any 
fresh  power  or  inventiveness.  Richard  Claude  Carton 
(Mr.  R.  D.  Critchett)  won  popularity 
Richard  Claude  with  Liberty  Hall  (1892)  in  which  he 
Carton,  b.  1853.  borrowed  from  Goldsmith  the  melo- 
dramatic situation  of  the  rich  squire 
who,  in  disguise,  helps  needy  relatives  before  revealing 
himself.  In  later  plays  R.  C.  Carton  abandoned  himself 
to  thorough-going  farce.  Lady  Hunt-worth's  Experiment 
(1900)  turns  upon  the  experiences  of  a  countess  who 
serves  in  a  vicarage  kitchen.  Mr.  Preedy  and  the  Countess 
(1909)  shows  the  embarrassments  of  the  innocent  young 
man  who  gives  a  night's  shelter  in  his  bachelor  chambers 
to  a  vagrant  countess.  Of  such  material 
Henry  Vernon  are  his  farces  woven.  And  Henry  Vernon 
Esmond,  b.  1869.  Esmond  (Mr.  Henry  Vernon  Jack)  is 
another  popular  playwright  whose  best 
gift  lies  with  farcical  comedy  written  with  no  purpose 
ulterior  to  the  amusement  of  the  audience. 


CHAPTER  II 

AFTER   IBSEN 

Bernard  Shaw — Granville  Barker — St.  John  Hankin — John  Galsworthy — 
Stanley  Houghton — Gilbert  Cannan — Githa  Sowerby — John  Masefield. 

THE  nature  of  the  revolt,  inspired  by  Ibsen,  against  the 
older  kind  of  drama  has  already  been  indicated  so  far  as 
a  movement  of  the  kind  can  be  stated  in  a  few  words. 
Writers  like  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  Mr.  Granville  Barker, 
Mr.  Galsworthy,  St.  John  Hankin,  assumed  that  drama  in 
England  was  fully  capable  of  following  the  model  of 
drama  in  Scandinavia  and  abolishing  from  the  stage  what- 
ever in  action  or  word  was  not  an  exact  copy  of  events 
in  the  house  or  street.  This,  in  part,  was  the  impossible 
ideal ;  but  the  new  impulse  communicated  itself  in 
differing  ways  to  individual  playwrights  ;  and  in  the  case 
of  several,  most  notably  that  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  in 
cultivating  the  belief  that  as  Ibsen  had  used  drama  to 
instruct  the  nation  in  manners  and  morals  this  was  the 
chief  function  of  the  theatre.  Ibsen  once  protested,  and 
truly,  that  he  had  been  more  a  poet  and  less  a  social 
philosopher  than  most  people  were  ready  to  recognise. 
But  of  this  protest  little  notice  has  been  taken.  The 
enduring  greatness  of  Ibsen  lies  not  in  his  stagecraft, 
not  in  his  bald  dialogue,  not  in  his  didactic  propensity, 
but  in  that  deep-founded  current  of  poetry  and  mysticism 
in  his  nature,  which,  even  in  his  prose-dramas  of  social 
life,  he  has  been  unable  altogether  to  obscure.  As  a  poet, 
unhappily,  Ibsen  has  made  little  impression  upon  con- 
temporary drama.  He  has  been  understood  as  an  intel- 
lectualist,  a  prophet,  a  naturalistic  painter  of  life,  and 
it  is  thus  conceived  that  he  has  been  a  dominant  force  in 
moulding  the  younger  dramatists  of  our  day.  The  nature 
of  his  influence  is  only  to  be  seen  as  it  expresses  itself  in 
the  ideals  and  work  of  different  disciples,  and  of  these 

237 


238  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  [PART  m 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  is,  in  England,  the  most  significant 
example.  He  may  himself  disclaim  discipleship  to  Ibsen 
and  point  instead  to  Butler  or  another.  And,  to  do  Mr. 
Shaw  justice,  his  plays  are  but  one  illustrative  example 
of  the  way  in  which  a  new  tendency  may  take  upon 
itself  surprising  developments. 

When  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  the  young  Irishman,  first 
came  to  London  he  wrote  novels  ;  and  it  was  during  this 
period  that  the  lodestar  of  efficiency 
George  Bernard  began  to  shine  upon  him,  and  with  it 
Shaw,  b.  1856.  came  his  Socialism,  his  active  member- 
ship of  the  Fabian  Society,  and  his  con- 
version by  Karl  Marx  to  a  belief  that  society  could  be 
saved  from  its  confusions  and  untidiness,  made  neat, 
orderly  and  efficient.  Ever  since  he  has  desired  to  furbish 
the  world  to  a  high  polish.  He  learned  also  to  abhor 
romanticism  and  idealism,  which  in  his  eyes  only  serve 
to  darken  counsel  in  economics  and  art  and  dim  the 
brilliant  gloss  produced  by  the  hard  rub  of  logic  and 
statistical  facts.  Idealism  he  pronounces  "  only  a  flatter- 
ing name  for  romance  in  politics  and  morals "  ;  and 
romanticism  he  regards  as  no  more  than  the  cant  of 
those  who  do  not  possess  normal  sight.  The  vision  of 
nine-tenths  of  mankind  is  abnormal  and  defective,  and 
in  the  remaining  tenth  stands  Mr.  George  Bernard  Shaw 
as  a  pattern  type  of  the  normal  and  clear-sighted  man. 
Whatever  he  cannot  understand  in  faiths  which  have 
claimed  the  allegiance  of  other  men  he  pronounces  due 
to  distorted  vision.  Unconsciously  and  with  simple- 
minded  sincerity  he  joined  the  little  army  of  those  who 
question  what  is  simply  because  it  is,  and  not  because 
it  has  been.  Mr.  Shaw  has  glimmerings  of  sympathy  with 
thought  so  alien  to  his  own  as  that  of  Plato,  but  he 
publicly  declared  himself  an  atheist  at  fifteen  because 
the  belief  in  God  is  still  a  commonly  accepted  article  of 
faith.  And  because  Darwin  and  Huxley  were  too  much 
with  the  world  he  derided  science  for  the  inartistic 
magnitude  of  its  lies,  and  declared  the  practice  of  medicine 
a  modern  witchcraft.  With  a  curious  blindness  to  analogy, 
however,  he  was  able  to  accept  the  unrelated  statistics  of 
the  Fabian  Society,  while  he  rejected  religion  and  biology 
without  which  they  have  little  meaning  and  scarcely  any 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  239 

importance.  Mr.  Sidney  Webb  has  preached  the  gospel 
of  salvation  by  force  of  actual  facts  patiently  collected 
and  carefully  tabulated — before  these  new  tables  of  the 
law  thrones  and  principalities  of  inefficiency  and  waste 
fulness  will  one  day  crumble  to  the  dust.  And  in  the 
formation  of  Mr.  Shaw's  mind  as  prophet  and  re- 
former the  Fabian  Society,  directed  by  the  mathematical 
gospel  of  Mr.  Sidney  Webb,  has  been  a  chief  source  of 
influence. 

The  novels  of  Mr.  Shaw's  nonage  show  him  feeling  his 
way  not  only  toward  expression,  but  to  the  discovery  of 
something  to  express  :  before  he  had  finished  with  them 
he  was  entering  upon  his  inheritance.  For  the  novel  is 
always  with  him  :  his  drama,  which  so  often  collapses  into 
talk  without  action,  is  only  the  novel  transferred  to  the 
stage.  It  is  possible  that  Mr.  Shaw  would  have  made  a 
more  lasting  name  for  himself  had  he  continued  to  walk 
his  first  path  in  literature  ;  although,  even  in  fiction,  the 
absence  of  anything  like  style  would  have  derogated  from 
his  chances  of  enduring  fame.  It  may  be  answered  that 
Mr.  Shaw's  style  is  sufficient  to  its  purposes  and  no  more 
can  be  asked  of  any  writer.  But  the  matter  does  not  rest 
here,  as  will  be  seen  later  in  commenting  upon  Mr.  Shaw's 
criticism  of  Shakespeare.  As  with  everything  he  attempts 
it  is  true  that  his  style  is  efficient  and  clear  ;  but  as  the 
utterance  of  a  strong  and  original  mind  it  is  the  most 
colourless  and  least  individual  style  ever  written.  Never 
was  any  writer  more  dependent  upon  what  he  says  and 
not  upon  how  he  says  it.  Charm  he  has  none,  but 
brilliance,  wit  and  ideas  in  sufficiency  ;  and  perhaps  these 
are  the  more  valuable  to  a  writer  who  comes  with  a 
message  and  has  always  declared  himself  the  dramatist 
with  a  moral  purpose. 

Between  the  period  of  his  novels  and  his  appearance 
as  a  playwright  eight  or  nine  years  intervened  in  which 
Mr.  Shaw  gave  his  days  to  musical  and  dramatic  criticism 
and  his  nights  to  the  Fabian  Society  and  Socialist  pro- 
paganda. He  chose  for  himself  the  cart  and  the  trumpet, 
and  set  up  as  "a  professional  man  of  genius."  His 
criticisms  were  often  marked  by  an  egotism  so  pronounced 
that  to  many  they  seemed  ludicrous  and  negligible.  It 
was  in  these  years  he  began  to  create  the  "  G.  B.  S."  myth, 


240  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  [PART  in 

which  is  still  largely  accepted  for  the  real  man.  It  was, 
in  point  of  fact,  only  a  mask  behind  which  Mr.  Shaw 
hid  himself ;  and  long  before  the  public  wearied  of  gazing 
upon  the  idol  his  creator  had  cast  him  off  save  as  a  jest. 
But  there  was  meaning  in  the  erection  of  a  large  image 
before  which  the  peoples  should  bow,  for  Mr.  Shaw  was 
a  young  man,  and  in  England  young  men  are  not  listened 
to  with  respect  unless  they  are  happy  in  being  born  to  a 
title.  Therefore  the  young  critic  blew  the  trumpet  before 
him  when  he  wrote  his  weekly  articles  on  music  for  the 
Star  (1888-90)  and  his  dramatic  criticism  for  the  Saturday 
Review  (1895-98). 

When  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  was  pushing  his  way  to 
notoriety  as  a  young  dramatic  critic  Shakespeare  had 
long  been  dead  and  Ibsen  was  living,  but  their  fame  was 
in  inverse  ratio  to  their  distance  from  the  day.  Shakes- 
peare for  nearly  a  century  had  been  a  fetish,  revered  by 
all  as  much  as  he  was  little  known  save  to  the  few  ;  Ibsen 
was  a  foreign  writer  of  scandalous  plays.  The  fame  of 
Shakespeare  was,  the  fame  of  Ibsen  was  not.  In  sub- 
servience to  principles  which  had  now  become  a  second 
habit  Mr.  Shaw  ranged  himself  on  the  side  of  Ibsen  and 
began  to  smite  at  that  huge  idol,  Shakespeare.  He  was 
well-equipped  for  his  task,  for  he  had  known  Shakespeare 
thoroughly  long  before  he  had  heard  of  Ibsen,  admired 
him  and  continued  to  admire  him  as  he  dealt  him  blows 
with  far  greater  knowledge  and  insight  than  the  multitude 
who  decried  his  sacrilegious  onslaughts.  The  ground  of 
Mr.  Shaw's  contention  was  a  moral  enthusiasm.  He  saw 
in  Shakespeare  a  man  deficient  in  inventiveness,  ideas 
and  moral  faith,  in  Ibsen  a  man  of  thought  and  a  moralist. 
Shakespeare's  power  lay  in  a  gift  of  language  and  a 
literary  knack.  How  he  said  a  thing  was  generally  of 
greater  moment  than  what  he  said.  Judged  by  the  test 
of  intellect  and  dramatic  insight  "  Ibsen  comes  out  with 
a  double  first  class,  whereas  Shakespeare  comes  out 
hardly  anywhere."  To  paraphrase  Shakespeare  in  the 
language  of  a  Blue  Book  is  to  empty  him  of  all  wit  and 
thought. 

Against  Mr.  Shaw's  contention  only  one  objection  can 
be  urged — that  it  is  not  true.  If  its  truth  be  admitted 
it  would  still  be  possible  to  defend  Shakespeare  against 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  241 

Ibsen.  For,  supposing  Ibsen  to  contain  any  thought  of 
high  value,  which  is  doubtful,  the  banality  of  his  utter- 
ance in  the  prose  dramas  of  social  life  outvies  the  tamest 
drawing-rooms  of  suburbia.  It  is  in  practice  impossible 
to  converse  with  so  little  light  and  shade  as  the  drama 
of  Ibsen  provides.  There  is  nothing  to  arrest,  and  nothing 
to  remember  save  the  general  story  of  each  play.  We 
never  meet  with  those  flashes  of  utterance  and  thought 
which  are  unforgettable,  wherein  more  is  said  than  words 
were  fashioned  to  say.  Ibsen  and  Mr.  Shaw  use  words 
merely  as  instruments  of  logical  expression  and  set  the 
potential  use  of  language  aside.  Now  even  Mr.  Shaw 
will  not  deny  that  drama  is  a  branch  of  literature  and  a 
Blue  Book  is  not.  And  literature  consists  not  in  the  use 
of  language  to  express  ideas,  but  in  the  use  of  a  language 
that  is  invested  by  context  and  analogy  with  a  special 
power,  an  unexpected  significance.  Where  ideas  combine 
with  literary  gift  there  is  the  highest  literature  ;  but  if  the 
attribution  of  literary  gift  involve,  as  it  certainly  must, 
a  potency  of  implication  in  the  use  of  language,  then  it  is 
impossible  for  the  literary  gift  to  exist  apart  from  language, 
and  to  assign  Shakespeare  a  literary  gift  while  denying 
him  intellectual  insight  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  Ibsen 
possessed  a  high  literary  gift.  Unfortunately  in  his  social 
plays  he  sacrificed  it  to  the  fetish  of  intellectual  drama, 
and  in  these  he  succeeded  in  showing  less  insight  into 
character  than  in  his  two  great  poetic  dramas  where  he 
allowed  full  play  to  the  genius  of  poetry  which  was  given 
to  him  in  great  measure.  More  might  be  said  to  exhibit 
the  contradictory  nature  of  Mr.  Shaw's  main  contention 
in  the  controversy  of  Shakespeare  against  Ibsen.  The 
discussion  is,  however,  chiefly  valuable  as  a  commentary 
upon  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw's  own  plays.  In  his  view 
Ibsen  is  great  because  he  writes  drama  that  is  intellec- 
tual and  moral,  and  Mr.  Shaw,  his  disciple,  is  great 
because  he  writes  plays  with  a  moral  purpose.  Shake- 
speare, the  pessimist,  cries  "Out,  out,  brief  candle!" 
because  he  lacks  moral  faith  :  Shaw,  the  moralist,  is  also 
an  optimist. 

Not  literary  expression,  not  even  characterisation  does 
Mr.  Shaw  consider  the  chief  thing,  but  the  lesson  con- 
veyed by  drama.  Upon  his  theory  a  drama  is  an  acted 


242  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

tract — the  lesson  the  audience  carries  away  is  the  impor- 
tant matter.  "  I  write  plays  with  the  deliberate  object 
of  converting  the  nation  to  my  opinions."  And  if  by 
morality  we  understand  no  more  than  a  congruity  with 
established  manners  and  customs  then  Mr.  Shaw  may 
fitly  be  described  as  "  a  specialist  in  immoral  and  heretical 
plays."  "  My  reputation,"  he  says,  "  has  been  gained  by 
my  persistent  struggle  to  force  the  public  to  reconsider 
its  morals." 

His  first  play  began  as  an  attempt  at  collaboration  with 
Mr.  William  Archer,  Mr.  Archer  providing  the  plot  and 
Mr.  Shaw  the  dialogue.  But  in  the  early  stages  the 
plot  was  exhausted  and  Mr.  Shaw  continued  upon  his 
own  course.  Widowers'  Houses  was  produced  by  the 
Independent  Theatre  in  1892.  It  is  definitely  a  play  with 
a  moral  purpose,  for  it  is  an  indictment  of  the  thousands 
of  worthy  and  complacent  people  who  live  comfortably 
upon  independent  incomes  without  troubling  to  inquire 
how  those  incomes  are  made.  Widowers'  Houses  is  a 
genuine  problem  play ;  for  it  raises  a  question  and  does 
not  lay  it  with  any  clearly  constructed  alternative.  And 
constructive  Mr.  Shaw  always  attempts  to  be.  Trench 
falls  in  love  with  Blanche,  the  daughter  of  Sartorious, 
an  owner  of  slum  property,  but  breaks  off  the  engage- 
ment in  horror  upon  learning  the  source  of  his  future 
wife's  income.  He  has  only,  however,  to  face  another 
and  a  ruder  shock  in  the  discovery  that  his  own  income 
comes  from  the  same  source.  Time  reduces  him  to  an 
unwilling  acceptance  of  things  as  they  are,  and  the  slum 
property  is  still  in  existence  when  he  returns  to  the  arms 
of  Blanche  Sartorious. 

-  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  made  a  good  beginning  with  this 
play.  The  dialogue  is  incisive,  moves  rapidly,  and  carries 
forward  the  action  of  the  drama  without  the  involutions 
and  digressions  of  his  later  plays.  The  characters  do  not 
attract  us  ;  nor  are  they  meant  to  be  other  than  objection- 
able, with  the  exception  of  Blanche,  who,  however,  only 
illustrates  the  inability  of  the  author,  already  apparent 
in  the  novels,  to  draw  a  woman.  So  far  from  representing 
a  strong-natured  but  unsophisticated  girl  Blanche  is  a  mere 
outline  sketch.  Ibsen's  masculine  types  are  far  inferior 
to  his  women  ;  Mr.  Shaw's  men  are  better  than  their 


CHAP.  H]  AFTER  IBSEN  248 

wives,  sisters  and  daughters.  Julia  and  Grace,  for  example, 
in  The  Philanderer  (1893)  are  fictitious  pieces  of  charac- 
terisation ;  and  the  former  is  only  interesting  as  the  first 
example  in  Mr.  Shaw's  drama  of  those  women  who  in  the 
"  sex  business  "  take  the  initiative  and  pursue  the  men. 
This  play  was  written  immediately  after  Widowers'  Houses, 
but  its  technique  was  unsuitable  to  the  company  of  Mr. 
Grein,  who  had  produced  the  first  play,  and  the  author 
replaced  it  with  Mrs.  Warren's  Profession,  which  was 
censored.  The  ineptitude  of  the  ban  laid  upon  this  play 
passes  belief.  The  idea  underlying  it  is  akin  to  the  thought 
of  Widowers'  Houses.  A  young  girl,  carefully  shielded, 
learns  the  story  of  her  mother's  past.  The  treatment  of  a 
hateful  subject  is  serious,  and,  as  a  writer  in  the  Edinburgh 
Review  (April,  1905)  declared  with  justice,  "  A  play  with  a 
finer  moral  determination  than  Mrs.  Warren's  Profession 
has  not  been  produced  in  Europe  during  the  last  twenty 
years." 

The  three  plays  just  named  were  printed  in  volume 
form  as  Plays  Unpleasant  together  with  a  companion 
volume  of  Plays  Pleasant  (1898).  In  the  volume  of  Plays 
Pleasant  came  Arms  and  the  Man,  produced  in  1894, 
Candida  (1897),  You  Never  Can  Tell  (1900)  and  the  one- 
act  Man  of  Destiny  (1897).  The  first  of  these,  described 
by  Brandes  as  "  a  masterpiece  whether  it  is  considered 
from  the  psychological  or  the  purely  theoretical  point  of 
view,"  has  proved  one  of  the  most  successful  of  Mr. 
Shaw's  plays  upon  the  stage,  though  it  can  scarcely  be 
ranked  with  his  more  important  compositions.  Probably 
it  has  generally  been  taken  for  farcical  comedy  and 
thoughtlessly  accepted  by  the  majority  of  every  audience 
which  has  seen  it  performed.  Its  witty  satire  upon  the 
fictitious  glory  of  war  and  the  romantic  idealism  of  woman 
has  been  disregarded,  and  the  success  of  the  play,  in  a 
popular  sense,  lies  in  the  ease  with  which  any  serious 
intention  it  possesses  may  be  passed  over  and  a  good 
play  left  in  the  residue  when  all  Shavian  ideas  and 
doctrines  have  been  eliminated.  Of  the  other  plays  in 
the  same  volume  You  Never  Can  Tell  is  the  least  purpose- 
ful and  perhaps  the  most  unsatisfactory  of  the  longer 
pieces.  But  within  the  same  covers  is  Candida,  the 
author's  greatest  success,  whether  we  have  regard  to  the 


244  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

technique  and  art  of  the  piece,  its  character-drawing  or 
the  directness  of  its  exposition  of  ideas.  Candida  is  true 
drama  and  not  clever  journalism  adapted  to  the  stage, 
as  some  of  Mr.  Shaw's  plays  tend  to  be.  Its  chief  characters, 
Morell,  clergyman  and  Christian  Socialist,  Candida,  his 
wife,  and  Eugene  Marchbanks,  the  dreamy  poet,  are  among 
the  best  and  most  convincing  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw's 
delineations  of  the  individual.  Candida,  placed  between 
the  two  men,  the  strong,  masterful,  hardworking,  famous 
and  popularly  applauded  clergyman  and  the  dreamy, 
unpractical  poet,  chooses  to  remain  with  her  husband, 
to  be  to  him  wife,  mother  and  sisters,  because  he  has  the 
most  need  of  her  and  is  the  weaker  of  the  two. 

"  What  I  am  you  have  made  me  with  the  labour  of 
your  hands"  [says  Morell  to  his  wife].  "  You  are  my 
wife,  my  mother,  my  sisters  :  you  are  the  sum  of  all 
loving  care  to  me." 

CANDIDA  (in  his  arms,  smiling  to  Eugene).  Am  I 
your  mother  and  sisters  to  you,  Eugene  ? 

MARCHBANKS  (rising  with  a  fierce  gesture  of  disgust). 
Ah,  never.  Out,  then,  into  the  night  with  me  ! 

The  whole  play  is  a  sincere,  human  and  truthful  piece 
of  work,  dramatically  conceived  and  dramatically  executed. 
It  is  the  one  play  in  which  Mr.  Shaw's  failure  with  women 
is  not  apparent.  Candida  and  Proserpine  Garnett,  the 
typist,  are  both  convincing. 

The  volume  of  Three  Plays  for  Puritans  (1900)  contained 
The  Devil's  Disciple,  Ccesar  and  Cleopatra  and  Captain 
Brassbound's  Conversion  ;  and  of  none  of  these  can  it  be 
pretended  that  it  takes  a  high  place  among  the  plays. 
The  Devil's  Disciple  begins  as  admirable  melodrama,  only 
to  be  ruined  by  a  conclusion  in  tedious  farce.  Ccesar  and 
Cleopatra  was  offered  as  an  offset  to  Shakespeare's  picture 
of  Julius  Caesar,  but  the  play  is  entirely  undramatic,  its 
spectacular  possibilities  are  damaged  by  prolix  dialogue, 
and  in  the  conclusion  we  feel,  as  Borsa  has  happily 
remarked,  "  Caesar  and  Cleopatra  have  a  great  deal  to 
do  in  five  long  acts  to  avoid  falling  in  love  with  each 
other."  Captain  Brassbound's  Conversion  may  be  placed 
with  You  Never  Can  Tell  as  one  of  the  least  significant 
and  interesting  of  Mr.  Shaw's  plays. 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  245 

Man  and  Superman  (1905)  is  his  longest  and  most  philo- 
sophical play.  It  resolves  itself  largely  into  talk  which 
cannot  be  rendered  effectively  on  the  stage,  and  the  long 
argument  in  the  third  act  between  Don  Juan,  the  Devil 
and  the  Statue  may  be  read  apart  from  the  play  without 
loss,  if  with  a  consciousness  that  the  ideas  might  have  been 
given  more  effectively  in  another  form.  The  play  as  a 
whole  embodies  a  favourite  thesis  of  the  author,  that 
in  the  "sex  business"  woman  pursues  and  man  is  the 
prey. 

From  this  date  forward  the  plays  tend  to  fall  into  one 
of  two  classes — plays  of  satirical  dialogue  without  action 
or  plays  of  undisguised  buffoonery  sharpened  with  wit. 
In  the  former  class  may  be  placed  John  Bull's  Other 
Island  (1904),  which  satirises  English  misconception  of 
Ireland  and,  in  consequence,  the  English  character,  than 
which  nothing  is  more  ridiculous  in  Mr.  Shaw's  eyes, 
Major  Barbara  (1905),  which  attacks  conventional  systems 
of  charity,  The  Doctor's  Dilemma  (1906),  vigorous  satire 
upon  the  medical  profession,  The  Showing-up  of  Blanco 
Posnet  (1909),  "  a  religious  tract  in  dramatic  form," 
which  met  with  the  ban  of  the  censor,  and  Getting  Married 
(1908),  which  explains  its  theme  in  its  title,  and  is  a 
comedy  upon  the  intolerable  character  of  marriage  as 
still  practised  among  civilised  nations.  In  the  second 
class  fall  Fanny's  First  Play  (1911),  an  amusing  play  in 
lighter  mood  with  an  induction  and  epilogue  in  which 
dramatic  critics  are  satirised,  Pygmalion  (1914),  which  is 
excellent  farce,  and  Great  Catherine  (1913)  in  which  once 
more  the  Englishman  is  satirised  with  undiluted  buffoonery. 

After  he  had  been  discovered  abroad  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw  was  for  long  years  a  prophet  without  honour  in  his 
own  country.  The  dramatic  critic  belittled  the  art  of 
his  plays  ;  the  audience  at  the  theatre  threw  up  its  hands 
in  horror  at  his  revolutionary  ideas  or  declared  petulantly 
that  it  was  impossible  to  take  seriously  a  man  who 
delighted  in  a  firework  display  of  unintelligible  paradox. 
His  plays  were  comparatively  little  seen  in  London  till 
a  series  was  produced  at  the  Court  Theatre  in  1905-6. 
But  Mr.  Shaw  has  long  ceased  seriously  to  shock  the 
middle  classes.  Whether  his  ideas  have  become  agree- 
able or  not  the  manner  of  them  is  well  known,  and  since 


246  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  [PART  in 

1905,  the  year  of  Man  and  Superman,  he  has  not  written 
anything  which  carries  forward  his  propaganda  or  adds 
intrinsically  to  the  importance  of  his  work ;  and  public 
opinion  has  divided  itself  into  the  beliefs  that  either  Mr. 
Shaw  is  tremendously  in  earnest  or  that  he  does  not  care 
to  be  intelligible  and  merely  laughs  at  himself.  The 
theory  which  holds  that  he  is  an  obscure,  paradoxical  and 
unintelligible  writer  is  difficult  of  confirmation.  Never 
was  the  meaning  of  any  writer  more  unmistakable,  at 
least  in  his  prefaces,  for  those  may  be  forgiven  who  are 
occasionally  in  some  doubt  of  his  intention  in  the  plays. 
Of  the  sincerity  and  purposefulness  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw's 
writing  there  can  be  no  manner  of  doubt.  He  has  finally 
won  his  place  because  he  is  sincere  and  has  a  constructive 
message  to  deliver.  Nobody  who  has  strong  convictions 
can  hide  his  light  under  a  bushel ;  and  Mr.  Shaw  has 
powerful  convictions  and  no  passion  for  self-effacement. 
Sometimes  he  appears  to  regard  himself  as  a  man  whose 
work  is  to  be  purely  destructive  ;  he  is,  nevertheless, 
governed  by  a  constructive  faith  and  creed.  In  his  plays, 
essays,  prefaces  and  tracts  he  has  given  himself  without 
stint  to  the  conversion  of  the  country  to  his  own  opinions, 
and  his  opinions  embody  themselves  in  outward  guise 
in  a  society  which  has  joyfully  accepted  a  rule  of  thumb 
adherence  to  lessons  deduced  from  the  statistical  tables 
of  Mr.  Sidney  Webb,  a  society  governed  by  cold  intellect, 
unweakened  by  romanticism,  idealism  or  sentiment. 
U;|Thus  it  follows  that  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  sees  life  and 
portrays  it  in  his  drama  through  the  mists  of  Fabian 
theory  and  argument.  His  temper  is  matter-of-fact :  his 
emotions,  and  he  is  not  without  them,  are  cowed  by  an 
aggressive  intellect.  There  is  no  room  in  his  world  for 
that  kindliness,  simple  affection,  bright-eyed  or  tearful 
sentiment  which  do  most  to  redeem  life  and  save  human 
existence  from  the  intolerable.  Nearly  every  man  and 
woman  in  love  becomes  sentimental  and  romantic  :  there 
is  no  sentiment  in  the  vigorous  lovers  of  Mr.  Shaw.  Julia 
Craven,  Ann  Whitefield,  even  Candida,  the  most  human 
of  his  women,  have  no  illusions  ;  and  the  men  whom  they 
protect  or  love  are  flippant,  cynical,  coldly  ratiocinative, 
or,  if  they  give  way  to  sentiment,  it  is  only  to  betray 
themselves  into  a  disadvantage.  On  Shavian  principles 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  247 

General  Boxer,  in  Getting  Married,  is  the  beau  ideal  of 
the  suitor.  He  protests  to  the  woman  who  repeatedly 
has  refused  him  that  she  cannot  be  without  the  desire 
for  children  or  the  satisfaction  of  the  natural  appetites. 
And,  because  Mr.  Shaw's  vision  of  life  is  abnormally 
intellectual,  he  has  rendered  one  side  of  woman's  nature 
as  it  has  never  been  represented  on  the  stage  before  ;  for 
woman  is  at  once  more  practical  and  more  emotional 
than  man.  The  practical  instincts  of  woman  he  has 
seized  admirably  ;  her  emotional  sophistries  and  subtle- 
ties he  has  completely  missed,  and  his  feminine  charac- 
terisations are,  therefore,  but  profiles.  And,  in  greater  or 
less  degree,  the  indictment  is  applicable  to  the  male 
characters  of  the  plays.  Keegan,  the  crazy  mystic  of 
John  Bull's  Other  Island)  offers  an  exception  to  a  rule 
which  makes  us  regret  that  the  accident  which  helped 
the  author  on  this  occasion  does  not  more  often  befall 
him.  But,  for  the  greater  part,  his  characters  are  used  as 
exponents  of  ideas  ;  and  the  habit  has  grown  upon  him, 
till  in  several  of  the  later  plays  the  dialogue  has  lost  all 
character  and  individuality,  resolving  itself  into  a  tossing 
from  mouth  to  mouth  of  a  contention  between  advanced 
notions  and  shocked  prejudices.  Each  drama  is  written 
to  elucidate  a  thesis,  which  is  stated  in  a  lengthy  preface 
of  greater  interest  and  composed  with  greater  cogency 
than  the  play.  His  characters,  therefore,  only  too  often 
remain  as  tags  to  everyday  topics.  Nobody,  it  is  true, 
would  deny  dramatic  insight  and  the  gift  of  sincere 
characterisation  to  the  author  of  Candida  and  Mrs. 
Warren's  Profession ;  but  even  these  suffer  from  that 
credulous  modernity  and  faith  in  the  vulgar  illusions  of 
the  actual  which  overpower  the  humanity  of  the  greater 
part  of  Mr.  Shaw's  drama  and  distort  it  into  the  clever 
young  man's  journalism  given  a  new  garment.  In  later 
years  the  prefaces  are  the  chief  matter  and  the  plays 
follow  as  an  illustrative  comment :  and  the  prefaces  are 
merely  exceedingly  good  journalism.  The  plays,  likewise, 
are  acted  leaders,  introducing  the  special  theories  of  a 
party.  They  thus  lack  artistic  restraint.  The  exaggera- 
tions in  character-drawing  and  management  of  the  action 
are  as  preposterous  as  in  Dickens  and  Ibsen,  and  less 
illusive. 


24$  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  nl 

Coleridge  once  declared  his  admiration  of  the  assertive 
young  man  whose  dogmatisms  ran  in  one  direction,  even 

though  they  might  be  plainly  wrong. 
Harley  Granville  And  clearly  defined  thought,  a  con- 
Barker,  b.  1877.  sistent  tendency  in  action,  an  undeviat- 

ing  ideal  in  art,  must  always  win  not 
only  respect  but  achieve  some  end  in  influencing  other 
workers  in  the  same  field.  Even  when  the  manner  or 
mannerism  is  difficult  of  imitation  and  possibly  even  a 
snare  to  the  beginner  something  will  be  made  of  it  if 
that  mannerism  or  method  be  followed  consistently.  To 
their  own  damage  young  novelists  have  followed  in  the 
way  of  Henry  James ;  and  many  of  those  who  have 
more  wisely  avoided  his  way  have  not  escaped  that 
general  manner  of  hovering  on  the  wing  about  the  mental 
processes  of  the  characters  portrayed.  The  widely 
diffused  resolution  of  the  dramatic  or  narrative  repre- 
sentation of  life  into  a  kind  of  psychometric  is  largely  due 
to  Henry  James.  Mr.  Granville  Barker  was  probably 
in  no  way  a  conscious  disciple  of  the  American  novelist, 
but  his  prolix,  involved  and  somewhat  chilling  intellec- 
tual drama  is  in  the  same  class  of  workmanship  as 
Henry  James's  novels.  Mr.  Barker's  plays  have  also 
affinities  with  those  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  :  and  the  bare 
realism  of  Ibsen  has  influenced  him,  although  he  has 
learned  no  lessons  in  the  art  of  form  from  Ibsen,  who 
never  transgresses  against  the  dramatic  virtue  of  suc- 
cinctness and  relevance.  When  a  very  young  man  Mr. 
Barker  had  in  him  the  gifts  and  graces  of  poetry  and 
romance,  as  The  Marrying  of  Ann  Leete  (1901)  plainly 
showed.  But  he  was  unfortunately,  against  his  better 
nature,  inspired  with  an  enthusiasm  for  intellectual  and 
realistic  drama ;  and  when,  in  conjunction  with  Mr. 
Vedrenne,  he  gained  control  of  the  Court  Theatre  the 
plays  he  preferred  to  produce  were  those  of  Ibsen, 
Hauptmann,  Schnitzler,  Mr.  Shaw,  Mr.  Galsworthy 
and  St.  John  Hankin.  And  his  own  plays,  without 
abandoning  the  detailed  psychology  already  manifest  in 
The  Marrying  of  Ann  Leete,  adopted  in  addition  the 
methods  of  the  realists.  He  became  one  of  the  naturalists, 
elaborately  painful  in  his  conception  of  character  and 
rendering  of  dialogue,  whether  trivial  or  impassioned, 


CHAP.  H]  AFTER  IBSEN  249 

continually  probing  the  mind,  careless  of  movement 
and  action.  In  at  least  two  of  his  plays,  The  Voysey 
Inheritance  (1905)  and  The  Madras  House  (1910),  there 
seems  no  special  reason  why  they  should  open  at  the 
particular  stage  of  the  story  the  author  chooses,  and 
certainly  none  why  they  should  not  end  earlier  or  later 
with  equal  advantage.  And  Waste  (1907)  and  The  Many- 
ing  of  Ann  Leete  are  only  a  little  less  inconclusive. 

Mr.  Barker  adopted  for  his  manner  as  a  playwright  a 
passionless  intellectual  impressionism.  The  picture  ofthe 
well-to-do  shopkeeper's  home  and  family  in  the  first  act 
of  The  Madras  House  is  a  striking  piece  of  work.  The 
inanimate  dialogue,  the  insipid  questions,  the  repetitions 
of  phrase,  exactly  render  the  atmosphere  of  the  house, 
the  character  of  the  inmates  and  the  whole  tradition 
of  their  lives.  The  inconsequence  of  the  dialogue  in  this 
act,  however,  is  not  merely  a  faithful  rendering  of  what 
happens  in  middle-class  households,  it  is  a  part  of  Mr. 
Barker's  adopted  manner ;  and  therefore  he  is  here 
eminently  successful.  But  in  the  larger  part  of  his  drama 
this  habit  of  prolix  involution  in  dialogue  is  his  greatest 
fault.  It  is  talk,  and  not  always  talk  that  is  relevant  or 
significant.  In  these  plays  Mr.  Barker  exactly  transfers 
life  to  the  stage ;  but  he  interprets  nothing.  The  street 
and  the  counting-house  are  almost  more  exegetical  of 
themselves. 

The  Voysey  Inheritance  depicts  the  inheritance  by 
Edward  Voysey  and  other  members  of  the  family  of  debts 
incurred  by  the  elder  Mr.  Voysey,  who  has  swindled  his 
clients  of  their  money.  It  offers  a  curiously  interesting 
picture  of  perturbations  in  the  minds  of  different  members 
of  the  family  ;  but,  as  it  began  in  the  middle  of  the  story, 
it  breaks  off  without  development,  and  nothing  is  left 
to  us.  Waste  turns  upon  the  discovery  of  an  intrigue 
which  injures  the  career  of  an  aspiring  politician,  a  theme 
often  used,  and  employed  in  a  different  way  by  Stanley 
Houghton  in  Trust  the  People.  The  Madras  House  has 
scarcely  any  narrative  or  dramatic  movement  that  can 
be  stated — it  is  a  picture  of  middle-class  people  connected 
with  a  large  metropolitan  drapery  establishment.  In 
these  plays  Mr.  Barker  is  at  little  pains  to  dramatise  any 
of  his  themes  :  a  minutely  intellectual  psychology  is  his 


250  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

purpose,  and  we  are  led  to  suspect  that  he  would  have 
succeeded  better  had  he  cast  his  plays  in  the  form  of 
the  novel.  The  narrative  contained  in  the  stage  directions 
and  descriptions  of  character  are  frequently  more  illuminat- 
ing than  the  dialogue.  Thus,  when  we  are  told  of  Dr. 
Wedgecroft  that  he  "  squeezes  Miss  Trebell's  hand  with 
an  air  of  fearless  affection  which  is  ...  not  the  least 
lovable,"  and  of  Mr.  Brigstock  that  he  is  "  as  agitated 
as  his  wife,  and  as  he  has  no  nervous  force  to  be  agitated 
with  is  in  a  greater  state  of  wretchedness  "  we  conceive 
the  whole  character  of  the  individual  in  either  case.  More 
is  told  us  here  than  in  all  the  dialogue  or  dramatic  move- 
ment. In  direct  narrative  and  in  impersonal  description 
Mr.  Barker  would  probably  have  been  completely  success- 
ful. His  plays,  like  those  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  are  really 
novels  on  the  stage.  Their  tense  psychological  atmo- 
sphere, the  length  of  their  dialogue,  the  introduction  of 
unrelated  discussions  on  political  and  social  topics,  the 
absence  of  movement  make  them  difficult  of  representa- 
tion. Further,  they  are  comparatively  passionless;  the 
tension  is  coldly  intellectual  and  apt  to  leave  the  audience 
jaded.  Mr.  Barker  pores  over  his  characters  with  the 
exact  patience  of  the  bacteriologist  in  his  laboratory  ;  Mr. 
Galsworthy  analyses  with  the  matter-of-factness  of  the 
practising  barrister  ;  Mr.  Shaw  imports  his  own  personality 
into  every  situation. 

In  his  three  more  important  plays  Mr.  Barker  has 
followed  an  ideal  and  method  to  which  he  was  not  born. 
But  there  are  signs  in  his  productions  of  Shakespeare  and 
in  one  or  two  curtain-raisers  in  which  he  has  collaborated 
that  his  natural  self  is  returning.  He  is  still  a  young  man  ; 
and  his  work  as  a  playwright  hitherto  can  hardly  be 
regarded  as  a  safe  indication  of  his  future  development. 

St.  John  Hankin  was  a  few  years  older  than  Mr.  Gran- 

ville  Barker,   but  his  appearance  as  a  dramatist  came 

later.     His   first   successful   play,    The 

St.  John  Emile          Return  of  the  Prodigal,  was  produced  by 

Clavering  Hankin,     the  Vedrenne-Barker  management  at  the 

1869-1909.  Court  Theatre  in  1905.     Before  this  he 

had  been  occupied  with  journalism  both 

in  London  and  Calcutta,  although  playwriting  was  always 

his  ambition.    The  first  of  his  plays  to  be  acted  was  The 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  251 

Two  Mr.  Wetherbys,  which  was  privately  performed  by  the 
Stage  Society  in  1903.  Shortly  after  this  ill-health  com- 
pelled him  to  retire  from  London  life,  and  from  his  seclu- 
sion in  the  country  he  produced  those  plays  which  have 
given  him  a  place  in  the  English  world  of  letters  which  is 
scarcely  likely  to  be  lost. 

In  St.  John  Hankin's  satire  on  middle-class  standards 
of  morality  we  may  trace  the  influence  of  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw ;  but  he  showed  his  originality  in  his  absolute 
freedom  from  the  illusions  and  sentiments  which  Mr. 
Shaw  has  unconsciously  cherished.  St.  John  Hankin's 
comedies  close  with  the  triumph  of  the  villain.  This  was 
his  form  of  protest  against  the  happy  ending,  which,  if 
more  hackneyed,  is  at  least  as  true  a  conception  as  the 
unhappy  ending,  for  the  good  man  may,  on  the  whole,  be 
counted  to  win  the  best  that  is  in  life.  His  plays  naturally 
met  with  but  limited  favour  from  a  public  who  pre- 
ferred the  happy  ending  and  found  Hankin's  cynical  wit 
distasteful. 

St.  John  Hankin  based  his  writing  upon  a  theory  and 
a  theory  in  which  he  believed  with  fervour.  He  excluded 
all  sentiment  and  sham ;  he  had  no  sympathy  with 
ecstatic  moralities  and  ideals,  holding  with  Butler  that 
the  perfectly  virtuous  man  was  as  offensive  to  God  as  the 
unrighteous  and  wicked  man  who  erred  too  far  on  the 
other  side.  His  drama  is  the  drama  of  uncompromising 
realism,  his  philosophy  of  life  a  cynical  common  sense. 
The  prodigal  who  arises  and  comes  home  to  his  father 
after  wasting  the  thousand  pounds  with  which  he  was 
packed  off  to  Australia  displays  no  spirit  of  repentance. 
He  regards  it  as  a  matter  of  temperament  and  circum- 
stance that  his  father  and  elder  brother  prefer  to  live 
respectably  at  home  and  work  hard  at  the  factory  amass- 
ing wealth.  For  the  prodigal  this  is  impossible ;  his 
nature  forbids  it.  His  father  has  brought  him  into  the 
world  ;  he  demands  a  yearly  allowance  for  doing  nothing 
— and  gets  it. 

The  motives  of  his  other  plays  are  similar  in  general 
character.  Lady  Denison,  who  adopts  and  puts  into 
practice  the  charitable  and  philanthropic  schemes  of  the 
idealist,  Basil  Hylton,  discovers  that  she  opens  the  gates 
to  misdemeanours  and  embarrassing  complications  with- 


252  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  ra 

out  benefiting  anyone.  Altruistic  philanthropy,  in  St. 
John  Hankin's  eyes,  was  as  likely  to  do  harm  as  good. 
Pride  of  race  and  generations  of  tenure  on  one  spot 
have  weakened  the  strength  and  will-power  of  individual 
members  of  a  family.  The  daughter  who  chooses  to  be  a 
mother  without  marrying  and  to  earn  her  living  by 
keeping  a  hat  shop  in  London  is  better  morally  than  her 
unadventurous  and  weak  relatives  who  stay  at  home. 
These  are  the  plot-ideas  which  Hankin  chose  ;  and  as 
an  example  of  merciless  realism  The  Last  of  the  De  Mullins 
(1908)  is  his  pattern-play.  It  is  throughout  a  tense  piece 
of  writing  ;  and,  if  it  preaches  a  moral,  the  naturalness 
of  the  characters  and  their  environment  obscures  this 
fact.  It  is  a  picture  of  life  with  its  strange  inversions  of 
right  and  wrong,  justice  and  injustice,  the  things  that 
are  fitting  and  the  things  that  are  not.  We  can  sympathise 
with  the  passionate  and  excited  eloquence  of  old  De 
Mullin  when  he  storms  at  the  daughter  who  has  smirched 
the  family  honour  by  bearing  a  child  out  of  wedlock 
and  soiled  her  hands  with  a  trade.  A  man  is  in  the  right 
to  love  the  place  where  his  forefathers  have  lived  for 
generations  ;  but  Janet  De  Mullin  is  also  right  when  she 
cries  impatiently— 

'  You  seem  to  think  there's  some  peculiar  virtue 
about  always  living  in  the  same  place.  I  believe  in 
people  uprooting  themselves  and  doing  something  with 
their  lives." 

And,  for  once,  Hankin  loses  his  cold  restraint  when  he 
allows  Janet,  the  unwedded  mother,  to  cry — 

"  To  know  that  a  child  is  your  very  own,  is  a  part 
of  you.  That  you  have  faced  sickness  and  pain  and 
death  itself  for  it.  That  it  is  yours  and  nothing  can 
take  it  from  you  because  no  one  can  understand  its 
wants  as  you  do.  To  feel  its  soft  breath  on  your  cheek, 
to  soothe  it  when  it  is  fretful  and  still  it  when  it  cries, 
that  is  motherhood  and  that  is  glorious." 

But,  as  a  rule,  there  is  little  passion  in  St.  John  Hankin's 
writing.  He  studies  his  characters  and  their  conventional 
motives  in  the  spirit  of  the  dispassionate  analyst.  The 
Last  of  the  De  Mullins  is  a  stronger  and  more  emotional 
play  than  the  others,  because  in  it  Hankin  was  obviously 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  258 

constrained  to  utter  himself ;  and  for  a  like  reason  The 
Return  of  the  Prodigal  is  but  little  inferior  to  it  in  force 
and  dramatic  intensity.  The  subject  of  The  Charity  that 
Began  at  Home  (1906)  does  not  easily  admit  of  forcible 
character-drawing,  and  the  play  is  the  least  successful 
of  his  works.  The  Cassilis  Engagement  (1907)  was  the 
most  popular  of  his  plays  because  it  was  the  least  rebel- 
lious, and  it  is  also  excellently  adapted  to  lively  repre- 
sentation on  the  stage.  Nevertheless  in  theme  and  humour 
it  is  less  characteristic  of  Hankin  than  anything  of  equal 
length  he  wrote. 

Hankin' s  stagecraft  is  admirable  ;  his  dialogue  is  a 
pattern  of  prose-dialogue  for  drama  of  modern  life.  He 
makes  no  mistake  in  being  too  brilliant  or  witty,  nor  does 
he  strain,  with  Ibsen  and  some  of  his  followers,  at  prosaic 
dullness  below  the  level  of  middle-class  drawing-rooms. 
His  men  and  women  talk  as  they  would  talk,  their  thoughts 
come  in  an  unforced  sequence  and  the  dialogue  flows  with 
natural  ease.  If  there  be  any  serious  fault  in  Hankin' s 
work  it  is  that  he  is  too  detached,  too  analytical,  too  aloof 
from  his  characters.  And,  therefore,  in  the  more  serious 
crises  of  life  he  misses  his  way.  With  one  or  two  excep- 
tions his  characters  do  not  spring  into  fire  when  they 
ought.  But  the  coldly  impersonal  note  of  his  drama  may 
be  largely  explained  by  the  ill-health  which  troubled  him 
for  many  years. 

One  cause  of  Ibsen's  success  with  the  average  audience 
which  thinks  but  is  not  intellectual  over-much  was  his 
incessant  modernity,  his  constant  dis- 
join Galsworthy,  cussion  of  such  questions  as  sex- 
b.  1867.  relationship,  woman's  position  in  the 

social  scale,  the  place  of  idealism  in 
politics,  the  disease  of  nervous  hysteria  and  that  host  of 
other  embarrassments  which  trouble  us  more  than  they 
did  our  forefathers.  The  types  Ibsen  continually  repro- 
duced, the  neurotic  and  half-educated  girl  who  is  married 
too  early,  the  conventional  clergyman,  the  demagogue, 
the  dreamy  idealist,  are  they  not  peculiarly  with  us  to-day  ? 
And  herein  Mr.  Galsworthy  has  followed  in  Ibsen's  foot- 
steps. He  is  an  interpreter  of  Anglo-Saxon  modernity, 
denouncing  our  evil  ways,  especially  our  reprehensible 
class  distinctions  and  the  selfish  warfare  between  labour 


254  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

and  capital.  And,  like  Ibsen,  Mr.  Galsworthy  is  impartial, 
detached,  analytical ;  like  Ibsen  he  has  been  accused  of 
pessimism  because  he  sees  the  sorrow  of  life  as  well  as  its 
joy ;  but  he  is  even  more  cold  and  judicial  than  Ibsen, 
his  humour  is  as  meagre,  and  he  is  without  Ibsen's  fervour 
and  poetic  genius.  We  cannot  but  suspect  that  sub- 
consciously the  knowledge  of  a  want  of  poetry  has  coloured 
Mr.  Galsworthy's  views  upon  the  future  of  English  drama 
("  Some  Platitudes  Concerning  Drama,"  Fortnightly  Re- 
view, December,  1909).  It  will  probably,  he  prophesies, 
flow  down  two  main  channels  "  situate  far  apart."  The  one 
channel  will  be  that  of  naturalism  "  faithful  to  the  seeth- 
ing and  multiple  life  around  us,  drama  such  as  some  are 
inclined  to  term  photographic,"  the  other  a  poetic  drama 
"  incarnating  through  its  fantasy  and  symbolism  all  the 
deeper  aspirations,  yearnings,  doubts  and  mysterious 
strivings  of  the  human  spirit."  These  are  the  two  forms 
drama  will  take  upon  itself  in  the  immediate  future,  forms 
rising  from  "  an  awakened  humanity  in  the  conscience 
of  our  time."  But,  says  Mr.  Galsworthy,  "  between  these 
two  forms  there  must  be  no  crude  unions  ;  they  are  too 
far  apart,  the  cross  would  be  too  violent."  Here  Mr. 
Galsworthy  is  speaking  for  himself  and  not  for  the  possible 
drama.  Ibsen  has  united  naturalism  and  poetry  in 
Rosmersholm  and  The  Lady  from  the  Sea  ;  often  when 
least  we  expect  it  the  gleam  of  poetry  lightens  his  prose 
world.  And  the  playwrights  of  the  Irish  Theatre  have 
brought  naturalism  and  poetry  together — Synge  and 
other  writers  of  the  school.  For  Mr.  Galsworthy  in  person 
naturalistic  and  poetic  prose-drama  are  "  situate  far 
apart  "  ;  he  is  not  only  incapable  of  welding  them,  he 
can  only  write  realistic  drama.  The  poetry  of  The  Little 
Dream  (1911)  fails,  and  that  play  of  fancy,  The  Pigeon 
(1912)  is  ineffective  dramatically  and  tedious  as  a  morality. 
Poetry  is  not  impartial  and  judicial ;  Mr.  Galsworthy  is 
by  nature  cold,  impartial,  judicial.  He  can  present  on 
the  stage  the  clash  of  character  with  character,  the  war 
of  the  classes,  the  struggle  of  the  poor  and  the  rich,  and 
he  never  depresses  the  beam  of  justice  with  his  own 
finger.  As  a  dramatist  he  is  noteworthy,  but  he  is  never 
the  great  artist,  for  he  is  never  lost  to  himself,  and  the 
highest  art  is  ever  unconscious  arising  out  of  the  depths 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  255 

of  man's  being  from  a  region  unexplored  by  the  artist 
himself. 

The  importance  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  work  in  modern 
drama  does  not  lie  in  its  artistic  power,  but  in  its  moral 
implication  and  the  ethical  force  of  the  author.  That ' ' '  The 
Moral '  is  the  keynote  of  all  drama  "  is  the  chief  article 
of  his  faith,  and  by  this  he  means  neither  a  moral  which  is 
a  propitiatory  dramatisation  of  a  code  approved  by  nine- 
tenths  of  the  audience,  nor  the  code  by  which  the  author 
himself  lives,  but  a  moral  without  any  immediate  practical 
purpose,  left  to  the  deduction  of  the  individual  from  a 
faithful  and  undistorted  presentation  of  things  as  they 
are  for  their  own  sake — in  a  word,  the  ethical  method  of 
Shakespeare.  This  is  Mr.  Galsworthy's  theory  of  the 
drama,  and  sometimes  he  comes  but  little  short  of  his 
theory.  In  The  Silver  Box  (1906),  Strife  (1909)  and 
Justice  (1910),  conscious  as  we  are  that  Mr.  Galsworthy 
is  a  thinker  with  definite  views  of  his  own,  these  views 
are  only  apparent  as  they  are  shadowed  forth  by  a  pre- 
sentation of  life  that  is  cold  and  impartial.  Justice  is 
kinder  to  the  rich  man  than  to  his  poorer  brother,  labour 
suffers  more  than  wealth  in  the  warfare  of  the  modern 
industrial  world,  the  kindly  philanthropist  is  at  once  a 
laughing-stock  and  an  example  to  the  world,  these  and 
other  morals  may  be  read  in  Mr.  Galsworthy's  plays,  but 
he  makes  no  attempt  to  indoctrinate  his  audience  by 
methods  which  all  are  quick  to  resent  unless  the  doctrine 
be  also  their  own.  There  is  no  bias  in  the  moral  Mr. 
Galsworthy  sets  rolling,  for  he  is  faithful  to  the  ethical 
character  of  the  drama  of  modern  life  outspread  before 
him.  John  Anthony,  chairman  of  the  tin-plate  works, 
and  David  Roberts,  chief  of  the  strikers,  are  both  deserted 
and  "  done  down,"  and  nothing  is  won  for  either  side. 
The  morality  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  drama  is  concerned 
not  with  immediate  returns  but  with  the  ultimate  :  it 
requires,  therefore,  "  a  far  view,  together  with  patient 
industry,  for  no  immediately  practical  result." 

With  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  Mr.  Galsworthy  is,  then,  the 
writer  of  plays  with  a  moral,  the  author  of  tendency 
dramas.  But  unlike  Mr.  Shaw  he  makes  no  bid  for 
popularity.  Mr.  Shaw  must  bask  himself  in  the  sun- 
shine of  applause  or  the  atmosphere  of  execration ;  Mr. 


256  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

Galsworthy  can  pursue  his  own  path.  For  the  good 
of  his  public  Mr.  Shaw  has  been  more  thoughtful ;  for 
the  good  of  his  soul  Mr.  Galsworthy  has  chosen  the  more 
excellent  way.  The  satirist,  unless  he  raised  a  laugh, 
has  never  yet  cleared  away  from  the  heart  of  society  the 
accretions  of  evil  custom  and  easy  acquiescence.  John 
Bull's  Other  Island  helps  us  to  see  a  folly,  and  it  also 
makes  us  laugh.  Mr.  Galsworthy  hardly  makes  us  laugh, 
not  only  because  he  is  wanting  in  humour,  but  because  he 
is  always  a  little  strident  and  harsh.  Unless  he  is  writing 
with  acerbity  he  becomes  profitless  and  weak.  The  first 
inclination  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  talent  is  toward  satire.  He 
adopted  fiction  by  which  to  express  himself  because  it  was 
the  mode  of  the  day  ;  in  the  eighteenth  century  he  would 
have  written  satirical  poems  in  iambic  couplets.  When  he 
passed  from  fiction  to  drama  he  felt  more  painfully  the 
want  of  poetry  in  his  method.  Cold,  involved  and 
psychological  satire  can  have  no  place  on  the  stage,  for 
no  actor  can  represent  it,  no  audience  fix  its  attention 
upon  its  abstractions.  Mr.  Galsworthy  was  driven  there- 
fore to  converting  satirical  fiction  into  the  impartial 
analysis  of  the  drama  with  a  purpose. 

The  purely  human  problems  of  life,  love,  hate,  the  pas- 
sionate impulses,  mother-love,  madness  and  world-weari- 
ness with  the  inscrutable  ways  of  the  gods,  these  great 
themes  which  have  occupied  dramatists  of  all  ages  do 
not  disturb  the  mind  of  Mr.  Galsworthy.  His  vision  is 
narrowed  to  social  problems.  Justice  asks  the  question 
of  Tolstoy's  Resurrection — Is  society  justified  in  punishing 
individuals  in  accordance  with  a  judicial  system  ?  And 
the  impartiality  of  Mr.  Galsworthy  is  clearly  shown  in 
this  play.  The  clerk  who  tampers  with  a  cheque  is  a 
miserably  weak  and  neurotic  creature  before  he  goes  into 
prison,  and  he  is  the  same  useless  member  of  society  when 
he  comes  out.  The  only  justice  society  can  offer  him  is 
kindly  and  repressive  care  in  a  labour  colony.  But  this 
idea  is  not  the  motive  of  the  play,  nor  is  it  thrust  upon  us. 
The  same  inconclusiveness  attaches  to  The  Eldest  Son 
(1912),  a  play  with  much  the  same  theme  as  Stanley 
Houghton's  Hindle  Wakes.  A  young  man  of  good  family 
has  seduced  one  of  the  maid-servants.  He  offers  her 
marriage.  In  the  end  her  father  refuses  for  her,  declining 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  257 

to  accept  a  "  charity  marriage."  This  has  the  merit  of 
greater  probability  than  Fanny's  unlikely  refusal  of  Alan 
Jeff  cote  in  Hindle  Wakes :  but  intrinsically  the  play 
achieves  no  end  beyond  emphasising  the  impassable  barrier 
of  class  distinction  with  an  incisiveness  that  will  please 
the  most  reactionary  of  conservatives.  These  plays,  The 
Silver  Box,  Strife  and  the  inferior  Mob  (1914)  have  for 
dramatic  theme  economic  problems,  because  abstract 
difficulties  are  continually  in  Mr.  Galsworthy's  mind.  In 
Joy  (1907)  and  The  Fugitive  (1913)  he  has  chosen  more 
human  themes.  The  latter  is  Mr.  Galsworthy's  version 
of  A  Doll's  House,  and  a  version  more  credible  and  realistic 
than  the  original.  If  Nora  could  be  supposed  even  dimly 
to  realise  her  position  she  would  have  been  unable  to 
state  it  with  the  force  and  acumen  with  which  Ibsen 
preposterously  endows  her.  With  Clare  Dedmond  the 
position  is  different.  She  is  a  clergyman's  daughter 
married  to  an  ordinary,  well-behaved  Englishman  of 
means.  After  a  year  of  marriage  she  discovers  that  love 
for  her  husband,  if  it  ever  existed,  is  dead,  and,  struggle 
though  she  may,  she  cannot  conquer  her  feelings  of 
repulsion.  She  breaks  loose,  but  soon  collapses  in  the 
effort  to  support  herself  in  a  livelihood  and  battle  against 
the  world's  contempt  for  a  woman  who  has  deserted  her 
husband.  She  resolves  to  accept  the  inevitable  left  to 
a  woman  in  her  position,  but  relents  and  saves  herself 
from  fate  by  poison.  It  is  a  grim  and  depressing,  though 
powerful  and  credible  play.  Clare  Dedmond,  if  she 
can  give  little  reason  as  the  world  judges,  is  right  in 
demanding  her  freedom.  And  she  acts  consistently 
throughout  as  a  woman  fine  in  temper  but  not  fine  enough. 
The  defect  of  the  play  is  the  difficulty  of  avoiding  quite 
absurd  melodrama  in  acting  the  character  of  Malise, 
Clare's  friend,  abettor  and  lover.  It  may  be  said,  how- 
ever, that  in  The  Fugitive  Mr.  Galsworthy  recovered  some 
of  the  ground  he  had  lost  since  he  wrote  Justice  three 
years  earlier. 

Strong  and  unwavering  sincerity  in  a  writer,  absorbing 
his  whole  nature  and  dominating  every  thought,  will 
produce  work  of  impressive  quality  although  he  be  devoid 
of  the  higher  gifts  of  expression.  Mr.  Galsworthy's 
significance  lies  in  his  sincerity.  He  is  painfully  aware  of 


258  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

the  many  evils  done  under  the  sun ;  and  he  comes  as  a 
reformer  and  philanthropist.  But  he  is  wanting  in  a 
stronger  faith ;  the  burning  hope  which  has  animated 
greater  reformers  is  not  his  ;  his  world  is  uniformly  grey. 
None  of  his  plays  is  hopeful ;  and  the  dramatic  last  act 
of  Jtistice,  ending  in  utter  desolation  and  misery,  is 
characteristic  of  his  thought  and  attitude.  But  uninspir- 
ing, and  in  one  sense  uninspired  as  is  Mr.  Galsworthy's 
drama,  it  is  strong,  realistic,  and,  above  all,  it  has  no 
taint  of  the  theatre.  No  faintest  suspicion  of  stagey 
effect  clings  to  a  single  one  of  his  plays.  They  are,  to 
use  his  own  epithet,  "  photographic  "  drama. 

His  dialogue  is  the  speech  of  men  who  are  living  beings 
facing  the  exigencies  of  the  moment  in  an  ordinary  world. 
There  is  no  artifice  in  the  conversation  of  his  characters. 
Nevertheless  his  dialogue  is  not  merely  a  mechanical 
record  of  things  said  in  the  real  world.  Probably  the 
most  dramatic  circumstances  of  real  life  would  be  intoler- 
ably unconvincing  if  transferred  directly  to  the  stage. 
Mr.  Galsworthy's  dialogue  is  the  plainest  and  most  un- 
adorned matter-of-fact,  but  he  understands  the  two  arts 
of  omission  and  arrangement,  and,  in  consequence,  his 
plays  have  a  directness  and  economy  in  method  un- 
equalled by  any  living  English  writer. 

And,  further,  there  can  be  no  mistaking  his  characters. 
They  not  only  live,  they  are  so  clearly  defined  in  dia- 
logue and  action  that  hardly  any  room  is  left  to  the 
actor  for  personal  interpretation.  His  writing  claims  no 
ornaments  and  graces  ;  but  in  simplicity  and  directness 
few  modern  plays  lose  less  in  the  reading  and  gain  less 
in  the  acting,  even  in  these  days  when  the  producer,  not 
the  author,  is  the  presiding  genius  of  drama. 

Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  Mr.  Granville  Barker 
and  St.  John  Hankin  are  typical  examples  of  the  influence 
of  Ibsen  working  itself  out  toward  a  drama  of  modern  life 
which  shall  avowedly  treat  of  those  social  and  economic 
questions  vexing  the  modern  world.  They  are  on  the 
stage  what  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  is  in  fiction  ;  and  the  culmina- 
tion of  the  tendency  is  to  be  found  in  Mr.  Galsworthy's 
plays,  which  reject  every  device  accepted  as  axiomatic  by 
the  older  dramatists,  of  whom  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  may,;  be 
regarded  as  representative.  Mr.  Galsworthy  transfers  his 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  259 

people  from  the  office,  the  home,  the  street  to  the  stage, 
modifying  nothing  save  to  compress  and  arrange,  in  order 
clearly  to  direct  the  attention  of  his  audience  to  that 
question  of  the  day  which  is  the  business  of  his  play. 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  Mr.  Galsworthy  are  little  con- 
cerned with  individual  men  and  women  for  their  own 
sake  ;  they  are  commentators  upon  practical  problems, 
and  their  characters  are  to  them  only  of  interest  as  they 
elucidate  these  problems.  Their  drama  is  not,  therefore, 
a  drama  which  makes  its  appeal  as  a  work  of  art  which 
custom  cannot  stale.  But  there  are  signs  already  that 
the  economic-problem  play  has  seen  its  day.  Younger 
playwrights,  even  those  who,  for  want  of  a  better  term, 
are  to  be  named  "  realists,"  are  abandoning  the  pose  of 
the  demagogue  and  social  reformer  to  embrace  again  in 
drama  the  unchangeable  problems  of  the  individual  life — 
work  and  ease,  hunger  and  fullness,  the  relationship  of 
man  and  woman  in  the  simplest  terms,  of  the  old  and 
the  young,  friendship,  love  and  hate.  In  these  writers 
the  influence  of  Ibsen  is  not  absent,  but  the  impress  of 
other  ideals  appears,  including  that  of  the  Irish  school  of 
dramatists  ;  and  the  effort  has  been  made  to  carry  drama 
away  from  the  centre  and  provincialise  it.  Miss  Horni- 
man,  with  the  advantages  of  her  Manchester  Repertory 
Company,  has  gathered  a  band  of  younger  writers  for 
the  stage  who  have  turned  to  the  use  of  dialect.  Stanley 
Houghton  is  the  most  noteworthy  of  the  younger  dramatists 
of  the  north  who  has  used  dialect ;  and  with  him  Mr. 
Gilbert  Cannan  and  Miss  Githa  Sowerby  may  be  named. 
Mr.  Masefield  has  also  made  liberal  use  of  dialect  in  his 
plays  ;  but  his  characters  belong  to  Gloucestershire. 

Stanley    Houghton    turned    from     cotton-broking    to 
dramatic  criticism,  then  to  the  writing  of  plays,  and  in 

the  first  place  of  comedy.  Despite  his 
Stanley  Houghton,  true  and  unforced  humour,  he  was 
1881-1913.  only  moderately  successful  in  comedy. 

The  Dear  Departed  (1908),  which 
dramatises  the  coming  to  life  of  an  old  man  after  his 
relations  have  begun  to  divide  his  property,  though 
amusing,  is  entirely  unimportant.  Independent  Means 
(1909)  is  barely  a  comedy,  for  the  author  has  evidently 
not  decided  in  what  mood  to  write  the  play.  And  The 


260  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

Younger  Generation  (1910),  though  a  simpler  affair,  suffers 
from  the  same  hesitation.  The  plot-idea  has  no  originality. 
The  world  is  agreed  that  parents  make  a  vast  mistake 
in  insisting  that  their  children,  when  they  reach  the  end 
of  their  teens,  should  come  home  early  at  night,  should  go 
to  church  or  chapel,  should  hold  no  opinions  of  their  own 
or  certainly  not  express  them.  The  moral  is  a  little  out- 
worn for  full-grown  comedy,  and  Houghton  failed  to 
make  anything  of  it.  The  play  stands  first  on  one  leg, 
then  another,  the  author  undecided  whether  he  is  writing 
serious  drama,  farce  or  comedy.  Trust  the  People 
(1913),  in  which  he  attempted  a  comprehensive  picture 
of  political  life,  opens  with  a  scene  conceived  and  carried 
out  with  dramatic  force  and  then  breaks  down  into  what 
is  sometimes  little  short  of  farce,  the  more  ludicrous 
because  unintentional. 

Only  in  Hindle  Wakes  (1912),  where  Stanley  Houghton 
was  intensely  serious,  did  he  achieve  almost  unqualified 
success.  Alan  Jeffcote,  the  son  of  a  wealthy  mill-owner, 
compromises  Fanny  Hawthorn,  a  weaver  at  his  father's 
mill.  The  elder  Jeffcote,  a  man  of  dense  and  obstinate 
principle,  insists  on  his  son  renouncing  his  engagement 
with  a  well-to-do  girl  and  marrying  Fanny.  Alan  yields 
only  to  find  that  Fanny  refuses  to  accept  him.  He  is 
puzzled  and  suspects  that  she  is  sacrificing  herself  in  her 
anxiety  not  to  spoil  his  life.  She  protests  this  thought 
had  not  occurred  to  her. 

"  ALAN.    Then,  that  isn't  why  you  refused  me  ? 

FANNY.    Sorry  to  disappoint  you,  but  it's  not. 

ALAN.    I  didn't  see  what  else  it  could  be. 

FANNY.  Don't  you  kid  yourself,  my  lad  !  It  isn't 
because  I'm  afraid  of  spoiling  your  life  that  I'm  refus- 
ing you,  but  because  I'm  afraid  of  spoiling  mine ! 
That  didn't  occur  to  you  ?  " 

He  is  puzzled  and  asks  again, 

"  But  you  didn't  ever  really  love  me  ? 

FANNY.  Love  you  ?  Good  heavens,  of  course  not ! 
Why  on  earth  should  I  love  you  ?  You  were  just 
someone  to  have  a  bit  of  fun  with.  You  were  an  amuse- 
ment— a  lark." 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  261 

This  last  scene  surely  strikes  a  note  of  the  improbable  ? 
It  is  inconceivable  that  a  mill-girl,  situated  like  Fanny 
Hawthorn,  should  act  with  her  independence  and  speak 
like  an  emancipated  woman  who  had  studied  the  whole 
meaning  of  social  relationships.  The  note  is  as  false  as 
the  characterisation  of  Nora  in  A  Doll's  House.  Neither 
Nora  or  Fanny  could,  save  by  a  special  intervention  of 
providence,  emerge  so  suddenly  from  the  chrysalis  stage. 
Houghton's  first  two  acts  were  written  as  they  were  con- 
ceived, the  last  breaks  down  because  the  author  was 
thinking  not  of  his  characters  but  of  a  theory  of  sexual 
relationship  he  was  anxious  to  develop. 

The  improbability  of  the  last  scene  apart  Hindle  Wakes 
is  one  of  the  most  notable  plays  placed  on  the  stage  in 
the  last  few  years.  And  the  reason  of  its  success  is,  for 
the  greater  part  of  its  development,  its  perfect  reality. 
Stanley  Houghton  could  dramatise  effectively  the  Lan- 
cashire life  which  he  noted  shrewdly  and  clearly  ;  his 
humour  was  entirely  natural,  and  moreover  it  was  the 
humour  of  a  man  who  had  pondered  life,  who  saw  its 
margin  of  laughter  in  the  moment  he  painted  its  tragedy 
and  sorrow  with  uncompromising  definition,  obscuring 
nothing.  Furthermore  the  realism  of  his  method  was 
never  the  realism  of  the  dispassionate  observer,  whom  we 
recognise  in  St.  John  Hankin  or  Mr.  Granville  Barker  ; 
there  was  in  his  nature  a  simplicity,  an  unpretending 
modesty  and  earnestness,  which  gave  fire  and  strength  to 
his  best  writing. 

In  the  writing  of  drama  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  has  not 
yet  won  for  himself  so  marked  and  influential  a  position. 
Mary's  Wedding  (1912),  a  dialect  play 
Gilbert  Cannan,  in  one  act,  fails  upon  the  stage  because 
b.  1884.  the  element  of  poetry  introduced  into 

the  dialogue  is  obviously  unnatural  to 
the  characters  and  the  situation.  In  other  words,  the 
play  is  radically  false.  In  the  writing  of  it  Mr.  Cannan 
was  doubtless  influenced  by  memories  of  Synge,  and  the 
same  influence  is  again  manifest  in  Miles  Dixon  (1910),  hi 
which  he  tries  to  restore  to  the  stage  the  poetry  of  rough 
and  common  speech  and  an  unspoiled  vision  of  life. 

More  powerful  and  more  dramatic  is  Miss  Githa 
Sowerby's  remarkable  play,  Rutherford  and  Son  (1912), 


262  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

in  which  the  scene  is  laid  among  the  hard-headed  manu- 
facturing people  of  the  Tyneside.  The  whole  action  takes 
place  in  the  living-room  of  John  Ruther- 
Githa  Sowerby  ford,  the  stern  and  bullying  father  who 
worships  his  factory  and  subdues  his 
children  to  his  slightest  word.  The  two  high  merits  of  the 
play  are  the  creation  of  an  atmosphere  of  harsh,  grey 
life  and  the  tenseness  imparted  to  the  relationship  of  the 
characters. 

A  band  of  northern  playwrights  has  been  springing  up 
in  the  past  few  years,  and  among  them  others  might  well 
be  named,  but  none  has  rivalled  Stanley  Houghton  or 
Miss  Sowerby  in  her  single  striking  play,  nor  is  it  possible 
at  this  stage,  when  so  little  has  been  done,  to  judge  the 
Lancashire  writers  in  perspective  as  workers  with  common 
or  differing  aims. 

Mr.  Masefield  has  also  made  experiments  with  the 
dialect  play,  and  he  has  succeeded  in  writing  at  least 
one  forcible  tragedy,  although  he  can 
John  Masefield,  scarcely  yet,  either  as  poet,  novelist  or 
dramatist,  be  considered  to  have  found 
his  true  place.  The  Campden  Wonder  was  produced  at 
the  Court  Theatre  in  1907  by  Mr.  Granville  Barker.  The 
play  is  written  in  West-country  dialect  and  describes  how 
a  man  to  spite  his  brother  swears  that  he,  his  brother  and 
his  mother  have  murdered  a  man  for  his  gold.  They 
are  hung  and  the  man  supposed  to  be  murdered  returns. 
Excessive  improbability  is  not  the  worst  fault  of  a  piece 
which  suffers  from  the  number  of  its  loose  threads.  The 
Tragedy  of  Nan,  produced  in  1908,  is  a  better  constructed 
but  an  equally  dark  and  terrible  tragedy.  A  woman, 
contemptuous  of  the  mean  selfishness  of  her  lover,  stabs 
him  and  flings  herself  into  the  river.  Mr.  Masefield  is  the 
unshrinking  realist.  The  harshness  of  life,  its  relentless 
savageries  are  drawn  without  stint,  for  he  is  only  too 
prone,  here  as  in  his  poems,  to  confuse  violence  with 
strength.  But  Nan  is  a  tragedy  from  which  poetry  can- 
not be  dissociated.  The  ineradicable  poetry  of  life  is 
never  absent  from  its  rough  and  turbulent  scenes.  And 
it  is  this  enfolding  atmosphere  of  poetry  which  lends 
whatever  quality  it  has  to  The  Tragedy  of  Pompey  the 
Great  (1910).  Mr.  Masefield's  imagination  has  been  fired 


CHAP,  n]  AFTER  IBSEN  263 

by  the  downfall  of  empire  symbolised  in  the  death  of 
Pompey  at  Pelusium,  and  he  succeeds  in  rendering  in  a 
certain  degree  what  Shakespeare  conveys  so  powerfully 
in  the  Roman  plays — the  consciousness  of  a  world-empire 
behind  the  movement  of  the  actors  in  the  foreground. 
But  Pompey  suffers  from  the  absence  of  any  motive  save 
the  fall  of  a  man  once  in  great  power  :  it  is  a  chronicle 
play  rather  than  a  drama. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    UNCERTAIN    NOTE 

Sir  James  Barrie — Alfred  Sutro — Arnold  Bennett — Somerset  Maugham — 
Hubert  Henry  Davies — Rudolf  Besier — B.  M.  Hastings. 

OF  drama  it  is  probably  more  true  than  of  any  art  that 
each  age  gets  what  it  deserves.  In  any  age  and  in  any 

country  the  majority  of  plays  must 
Sir  James  Barrie,  be  produced  in  the  hope  that  they 
b.  1860.  will  prove  a  financial  success,  for, 

from  author  to  scene-shifter,  many 
are  concerned.  The  poet  may  enjoy  an  independent 
income  and  publish  his  verse  at  his  own  expense  careless 
of  royalties.  Practically  the  dramatist  can  never  enjoy 
this  happy  position,  for  the  whole  army  of  the  theatre 
is  dependent  upon  his  power  of  drawing  money  to  the 
booking-office.  A  few,  Mr.  Shaw  and  Mr.  Galsworthy  in 
particular '  at  this  moment  in  England,  may  write  to 
satisfy  their  own  intellectual  needs  and  yet  be  rewarded 
in  this  world.  But  the  number  who  can  hope  to  tread 
this  narrow  way  is  small.  The  writer  who  looks  to  his 
returns  must,  in  general,  be  satisfied  if  he  can  please 
without  entirely  sinking  his  own  individuality.  And 
because  his  work  marks  no  high  aims,  because  it  is  not 
indicative  of  personal  force,  it  does  not  follow  that,  even 
in  a  literary  sense,  it  is  entirely  negligible.  Sir  James 
Barrie  is  popular,  and  deservedly,  for  his  style,  grace  and 
charm  of  manner ;  but  he  is  significant  of  nothing  in 
modern  drama,  for  on  the  stage  he  is  most  delightful 
when  he  allows  his  fancy  to  roam  uncontrolled  by  reality. 
The  Little  Minister  (1897)  it  is  true,  apart  from  a  too 
abundant  sentiment,  was  a  picture  of  real  life,  for  it  had 
the  advantage  of  being  founded  upon  one  of  the  best  of 
his  prose-tales.  But  in  a  play  like  The  Admirable  Crichton 
(1903)  he  carries  us  over  into  the  regions  of  pure  burlesque. 

265 


266  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA  [PART  in 

Lord  Loam  holds  that  class  distinctions  should  be  effaced, 
and  he  is  ready  to  sit  at  meals  with  his  servants.  Crichton, 
his  butler,  believes  that  class  distinctions  should  be 
observed.  The  theme  is  dramatised  by  the  shipwreck  of 
Lord  Loam's  yacht.  Lord  Loam,  his  daughter,  her 
cousin,  the  tweeny  maid  and  Crichton  find  themselves 
on  a  desert  island.  Here  the  butler  comes  to  the  front, 
discovers  means  for  supporting  the  life  of  all,  and  the 
others  are  virtually  his  menials.  But  after  their  rescue 
and  the  return  to  London  the  old  order  reasserts  itself, 
and  Crichton  falls  back  into  his  original  position.  Equally 
popular  have  been  his  other  plays  of  burlesque  fancy  or 
sentimental  humour,  Little  Mary  (1903),  What  Every 
Woman  Knows  (1908)  and  Quality  Street  (1903).  The 
last-named  play  is  typical  of  his  favourite  manner.  The 
action,  which  is  placed  in  the  days  of  Napoleon  and 
Waterloo,  gives  Sir  James  Barrie  an  opportunity  for 
graceful  sentimentality  and  superficial  pathos  in  narrating 
the  love-story  of  the  daring  soldier  and  the  tired  school- 
mistress. It  is  charming,  it  is  pleasant,  it  is  quaintly 
ingenious,  but  it  shirks  everything  that  is  essential  to 
painting  of  human  life  and  character  whether  realistically 
or  in  the  spirit  of  optimistic  idealism.  Sir  James  Barrie's 
natal  gift  is  poetic  fancy  rather  than  imagination,  and 
this  gift  has  found  its  perfect  expression  in  the  beautiful 
child's  fantasy,  Peter  Pan  (1904). 

The  sentimental,  the  pretty,  the  humorous  in  undreamt- 
of situations  Sir  James  Barrie  can  touch  with  an  ease 
and  a  grace  which  is  given  to  no  other  writer  of  the  day. 
But  when  he  attempts  tragedy  or  the  intense  situation 
he  fails.  Half  an  Hour  (1913),  the  transcript  of  half  an 
hour  in  which  a  woman  flies  from  her  husband  to  her 
lover  and  returns  to  her  husband  before  her  flight  has 
been  discovered,  is  ludicrous  and  commonplace  melo- 
drama. The  husband  is  a  farcical  figure  ;  and  the  little 
play  is  a  piece  of  pure  artifice,  as  indeed  is  nearly  all  his 
dramatic  writing,  save  that  most  of  his  plays,  unlike 
Half  an  Hour,  are  redeemed  by  quaint  fancy,  kindly 
humour  and  tender  sentiment. 

Sir  James  Barrie  has  not  the  force  of  a  strong  personality, 
but  popularity  has  left  him  the  individuality  of  his  work. 
Of  Mr.  Sutro  it  is  difficult  to  say  as  much  :  he  is  now 


CHAP,  m]          THE  UNCERTAIN  NOTE  26? 

content   to   amuse   his   audiences    with    the    stereotyped 
tricks  of  the  comic  stage.      The  Walls  of  Jericho  (1904), 

his  first  success,  was  understood  to  be 
Alfred  Sutro,  satire  upon  idle  and  worthless  society  and 
b.  1863.  therefore  found  favour  with  all  classes.  But 

it  may  be  questioned  whether  the  moral 
implication  was  not  accidental  and  unsuspected  by  the 
author.  In  his  later  plays  he  makes  no  pose  as  the 
satirist  of  society,  Mollonlrave  on  Women  (1905),  The  Per- 
plexed Husband  (1911),  The  Two  Virtues  (1914)  and  other 
plays  which  fall  into  the  same  period  are  exaggerated  and 
artificial  farce. 

Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  is  an  example  of  a  dramatist  with 
a    commercial    sense    finely    developed.      In    The    Great 

Adventure  (1911)  and  Milestones  (1912), 
Arnold  Bennett,  the  latter  written  in  collaboration  with 
b.  1867.  Edward  Knoblauch,  he  has  succeeded  in 

producing  two  plays  which  have  won  upon 
the  public  fancy  and  enjoyed  remarkably  long  runs. 
In  the  case  of  The  Great  Adventure  this  popularity  can 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  reality  of  the  piece,  for  Mr. 
Bennett  names  it  a  "  play  of  the  fancy,"  and  he  might 
equally  so  have  described  Milestones  in  which  three 
generations  are  represented  in  three  acts.  The  humour 
of  the  situation  turns  upon  a  picture  of  the  daringly 
original  idea  of  one  generation  becoming  the  common- 
place of  the  next ;  but  perhaps  the  greatest  recom- 
mendation of  the  piece  was  the  opportunity  it  afforded 
for  quaint  contrasts  in  costume  and  furniture.  It  was 
distinctively  a  play  for  the  producer.  His  gift  of  light- 
hearted  and  fanciful  exaggeration  Mr.  Bennett  put  to  its 
best  use  three  years  earlier  in  What  the  Public  Wants 
(1909),  a  spirited  satire  on  the  up-to-date  newspaper 
proprietor. 

In    wit,     art    and    character-drawing    Mr.     Somerset 

Maugham    is    a    better    playwright    than    Mr.    Bennett, 

though  the  personal  note  is   often  but 

William  Somerset    faintly   heard    in    his    writing,    for    his 

Maugham,  b.  1874.  manner   has   changed   with    his   contact 

with     changing     influences.       His    first 

play  was  written  in  German  and  performed  in  Berlin  in 

1902.     His  second  play,  A  Man  of  Honour,  appeared  in 


268  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  m 

the  following  year,  and  since  that  date  he  has  produced 
novels  and  plays  in  continuous  and  rapid  succession.  He 
eclipsed  Wilde's  record  by  having  on  one  occasion  four 
plays  running  simultaneously  in  London. 

In  common  with  nearly  all  young  dramatists  he  began 
by  the  writing  of  tragedy.  A  Man  of  Honour  in  idea  and 
handling  is  not  original,  but  it  is  good  writing.  The 
sordidness  of  unhappy  marriage,  the  pathetic  agony  of 
the  little  barmaid  who  loves  passionately  and  knows  that 
she  cannot  hold  her  husband's  love,  are  drawn  strongly 
and  clearly.  But  he  has  not  chosen  since  to  write  any- 
thing in  the  same  manner.  Lady  Frederick  (1907),  which 
succeeded  it  at  a  distance  of  some  years,  professes  to  be 
comedy  and  betrays  a  study  of  Oscar  Wilde's  methods. 
Mr.  Maugham's  people  do  not  scintillate  as  brilliantly  as 
Wilde's,  but  they  are  witty  as  indiscriminately  and  with 
as  little  relevance  to  character.  The  play  was  one  of  Mr. 
Maugham's  great  successes  because  it  was  a  mixture  of  excel- 
lent melodrama  and  farce.  Penelope  (1909)  is  better  comedy, 
the  characters  more  realistic,  and  there  is  less  straining  for 
the  aphorism,  but  it  presents  no  features  of  outstanding 
merit,  nor  was  it  as  successful  as  Lady  Frederick. 

In  farce  Mr.  Maugham  is  eminently  successful.  Jack 
Straw  (1908)  and  Mrs.  Dot  (1908)  are  bright,  rapid  and 
amusing,  and  they  are  removed  from  commonplace  farce 
which  excites  laughter  by  mere  buffoonery.  In  his  later 
plays — Smith  (1909),  Loaves  and  Fishes  (1911)  and  The 
Land  of  Promise  (1914)  Mr.  Maugham  takes  himself  more 
seriously,  inveighing  against  the  manners  and  vices  of 
the  social  world  ;  and  the  change  is  probably  due  to  the 
influence  of  didactic  dramatists  like  Mr.  Galsworthy  and 
Mr.  Shaw.  But  Mr.  Maugham  is  well  able  to  hold  his 
own  and  write  with  something  of  his  own  manner,  for 
The  Land  of  Promise,  which  contrasts  the  manners  of 
the  old  country  with  the  way  of  life  in  a  Canadian  shack, 
is  a  fine  and  truthful  human  comedy. 

Mr.  Maugham  is  an  extraordinarily  rapid,  but  he  is 
also  a  good  and  accurate  worker.  He  has  taught  him- 
self the  requirements  of  the  stage,  and  if  in  Lady  Frederick 
he  represents  the  somewhat  naive  methods  handed  on 
by  Wilde  he  can  write  more  realistically  in  Penelope, 
and  in  his  later  plays  he  yields  to  the  obsession  of  the 


CHAP,  raj          THE  UNCERTAIN  NOTE  269 

period  in  trying  to  say  something  to  his  generation.  He 
is  never  strikingly  original ;  he  works  with  other  dramatists 
before  him  and  with  one  eye  upon  his  public  ;  his  aphorisms 
upon  life  are  not  many,  successive  plays  take  up  and  repeat 
the  best  of  them.  But  he  has  both  humour  and  wit ; 
and  for  these  much  may  be  forgiven,  even  the  rather 
distant  and  unconvincing  characterisation  he  offers  us. 
He  does  not  appear  to  have  acquired  a  strong  sympathy 
with  human  beings  ;  he  uses  his  characters  as  pivots  for 
dialogue  and  action,  content  if  they  are  sufficiently  true 
to  escape  being  wire-pulled  puppets  or  exaggerated 
examples  of  realism. 

Among  others  of  his  day  is  to  be  named  Hubert  Henry 
Davies,  who  succeeded  in  combining  good  writing,  some 
intellectual  depth  and  a  tender  emo- 
Hubert  Henry  tionalism  without  at  any  time  rising  to 
Davies,  1876-1917.  a  very  distinctive  level  of  workmanship. 
His  plays  are  in  large  part  plainly 
adapted  for  the  theatre  and  the  audience  ;  nevertheless 
they  rarely  fail  of  passages  which  give  indication  of  fine 
and  gentle  feeling.  The  character  who  takes  the  title- 
part  in  Cousin  Kate  (1903)  is  a  generous  and  warm- 
hearted woman  drawn  in  strong  and  simple  outline  which 
does  credit  to  Davies' s  knowledge  of  human  nature. 
The  story  of  the  stolen  jewels  in  Mrs.  Gorringes  Necklace 
(1903)  is  more  definitely  shaped  by  the  thought  of  an 
audience,  but  it  is  not  without  an  element  of  genuine 
truthfulness.  The  Mollusc  (1907),  if  again  a  little  melo- 
dramatic, manifests  the  writer  who  has  sympathy  with 
everyday  life,  and  who  can,  when  he  does  not  think  of 
the  stage,  draw  it  truthfully.  Cousin  Kate,  despite  its 
want  of  stagecraft,  particularly  in  the  intolerably  long 
dialogue  of  the  second  act,  appeared  to  give  promise  of 
better  things.  Davies,  however,  did  not  redeem  the  ex- 
pectations he  raised  with  this  play.  He  could  be  tender 
without  becoming  weak,  he  could  bring  light,  sweetness 
and  poetry  into  his  plays  ;  but  his  outlook  was  not  wide 
nor  is  his  hold  upon  reality  strong  ;  and  finally  the  com- 
mercial needs  of  the  stage  appear  to  have  been  too  much 
for  him. 

Of  the  work  of  Mr.  Rudolf  Besier  and  Mr.  B.  M.  Hastings, 
who  have  as  yet  produced  so  little,  it  is  scarcely  possible 


270  INTELLECTUAL  DRAMA          [PART  in 

to  speak.     In  Don  (1909)  Mr.  Besier  wrote  a  thoroughly 
good  play   in   which  the  clash   of  temper  with  temper 

was  powerfully  drawn.  It  was  strong, 
Rudolf  Besier,  ably  constructed  and  the  characters  were 
b.  1878.  human.  Lady  Patricia  (1911)  was  a  gay 

and  farcical  comedy,  vivacious,  amusing 
in  its  situations  and  little  more. 

Mr.  Hastings  belongs  to  the  realists,  but  not  to  the 
bald  and  painstaking  realists,  for  he  has  abundance  of 
humour,  sprightliness  and  dashes  of 
Basil  Macdonald  wit.  And,  further,  his  dialogue  is 
Hastings,  b.  1881.  remarkably  deft  and  clean-cut,  and 
his  ideas  possess  originality.  The 
New  Sin  (1912)  at  first  suggests  a  title  chosen  with  the 
aim  of  attracting  the  idle  who  seek  a  new  sensation  :  but 
the  play  in  itself  is  far  from  being  sensational,  and  the 
title  has  wit  and  point,  for  the  new  sin  is  the  choice  of 
life  rather  than  suicide.  So  long  as  Mr.  Hilary  Cutts 
lives  his  brothers  and  sisters  can  receive  no  part  of  the 
inheritance  left  by  their  father.  Upon  the  death  of 
Hilary  they  are  each  to  receive  ten  thousand  pounds. 
He  attempts  to  make  way  for  them  by  taking  upon  him- 
self the  guilt  of  a  cowardly  murder  committed  by  a  worth- 
less brother.  Unfortunately  for  this  scheme  he  is  reprieved 
by  the  Home  Secretary  ;  and  the  curtain  falls  upon  an 
outburst  of  chagrin  from  the  murderer  who  has  allowed 
his  brother  to  go  to  death  in  the  prospect  of  receiving  a 
fortune.  The  plot  is  preposterous  ;  but  the  working-out 
of  the  theme  and  the  character-drawing  are  striking. 
Furthermore,  although  we  are  not  burdened  with  didactic 
excursions,  we  are  conscious  that  the  play  comes  from  a 
writer  who  has  observed  life  and  has  something  worth 
the  saying.  And  in  another  sphere  the  light  comedy, 
Love — And  what  Then  ?  (1912),  produced  within  a  few 
months  of  The  New  Sin,  is  equally  a  striking  piece  of 
work.  The  Evangelical  clergyman,  the  butterfly  wife  who 
realises  that  she  is  a  pretty  woman  after  she  becomes  a 
mother,  and  the  human,  worldly-wise  bishop  are  delight- 
fully and  clearly  drawn  characters.  The  play  has  its 
weak  and  ridiculous  scenes  ;  but  these  lapses  are  not 
distinctive  of  Mr.  Hastings.  At  his  best  he  is  not  only 
humorous,  but  thoughtful  and  truthful. 


PART   IV 

THE  NOVEL 


CHAPTER  I 

LATE    DEVELOPMENTS 

IN  the  last  half -century,  or  a  little  more,  the  novel  is 
plainly  distinguished  from  the  fiction  of  the  preceding 
one  hundred  and  fifty  years  by  two  changes — a  notable 
gain  in  technique  and  an  increasing  solemnity  with  which 
the  novelist  takes  himself  and  his  work.  The  third-rate 
scribbler  of  to-day  would  blush  to  be  found  guilty  of 
those  weaknesses  in  the  conduct  of  narrative  into  which 
Scott,  Hugo  and  Thackeray  lapsed  with  magnificent  un- 
consciousness of  committing  offence.  In  the  mere  matter 
of  form  and  construction  the  chief  influence  for  good 
(and  sometimes  for  evil)  came  from  France.  Balzac, 
despite  his  insufferably  disorderly  habits  of  composition, 
wrote  at  a  white-heat  which  fused  his  material ;  and  his 
method  of  creating  half  his  matter  by  corrections  in 
proof  had  its  formal  advantages,  and  disadvantages  only 
in  the  printer's  bill.  To  describe  Balzac  either  as  a  stylist 
or  a  master  of  form  would  be  impossible  ;  but  there  is  in 
him  a  concentration  which  distinguishes  his  writing  from 
that  of  his  great  contemporaries,  George  Sand  and  the 
elder  Dumas.  They  wrote  to  the  bidding  of  passing 
impulses,  poetically,  romantically  ;  Balzac,  possessed  by 
the  French  passion  for  analysis  and  arrangement,  sketched 
out  the  vast  outlines,  never  completely  to  be  filled  in,  of 
La  comedie  humaine.  Incohate  as  is  the  whole,  it  is  still 
a  vision  of  order.  The  first  of  the  masters  of  form 
for  form's  sake,  Prosper  Merimee,  came  a  little  later.  He 
and  Gautier  discovered  and  made  the  short  story  as  it 
is  still  understood  and  written.  Of  all  forms  in  prose- 
writing  the  short  story  calls  for  the  highest  endowment 
of  artistic  faculty  in  the  author,  and  it  is,  therefore, 
despite  the  immense  opportunities  afforded  by  the  plethora 
of  modern  magazines,  seldom  compassed  with  success. 

T  273 


274  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Gautier  chose  unto  himself  the  motto  Vart  pour  I'art,  a 
counsel  of  the  impossible  which  will  always  meet  with 
its  periods  of  resuscitation  from  the  limbo  of  human 
failures.  Its  practice  in  the  strictness  of  the  letter  invari- 
ably prostrates  the  artist  in  emotional  and  intellectual  ex- 
haustion. Flaubert,  who  succeeded  Gautier  and  Merimee, 
was,  with  his  disciple  Guy  de  Maupassant,  saved  from 
nemesis  by  the  original  vice  of  romanticism,  from 
which  neither  was  wholly  delivered,  despite  high-minded 
devotion  to  the  practice  of  realism,  artistic  form  and  the 
discovery  of  the  mot  propre.  Nevertheless  in  the  second 
half  of  the  last  century  no  novelist,  as  an  influence  and  a 
moulding  force,  can  be  counted  as  of  equal  importance 
with  Flaubert.  Madame  Bovary  (1859)  is  a  boundary 
mark  in  the  story  of  European  fiction.  Beyond  and  above 
all  differences  his  influence  is  traceable  in  the  brothers 
de  Goncourt,  Daudet,  Maupassant,  and  to  carry  the  survey 
into  our  foreground,  in  M.  Pierre  Loti  and  M.  Anatole 
France.  The  lesson  of  the  French  novel,  principally  as 
exemplified  in  the  work  of  Balzac,  Flaubert,  Maupassant 
and  Zola,  crossed  the  channel  and  reappeared  in  the  fiction 
of  Oscar  Wilde,  Mr.  George  Moore,  Hubert  Crackanthorpe, 
Ernest  Dowson,  Henry  Harland,  and,  after  his  own  bent 
and  manner,  in  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy.  Even  before  their 
advent  the  tide  had  turned.  Dickens,  Thackeray  and 
George  Eliot  wrote  novels  much  as  they  had  been  written 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  in  an  over-long,  disorderly 
and  ill-judged  manner.  Charlotte  Bronte,  however, 
evolved  in  Jane  Eyre  and  Villette  the  novel  of  narrow 
range,  which  projected  its  interest  upon  two  or  three 
figures,  the  other  characters  serving  as  a  curtain  against 
which  the  protagonists  stood  in  clear  relief.  The  credit 
of  directing  Charlotte  Bronte's  aims  in  fiction  can  hardly 
be  given  to  the  French  realists  :  her  venture  was  an 
independent  leading  of  her  own  genius ;  but  uninten- 
tionally she  was  a  forerunner  of  change.  New  ideals  in 
the  art  of  construction,  concentration,  compression,  style, 
chiefly  borrowed  from  France  and  sometimes  worked  in 
a  manner  peculiarly  English,  mark  a  break  which  separ- 
ates the  fiction  of  the  earlier  and  the  latter  half  of  the 
century. 

The  older  novelist  was  not  merely  content  to  find  his 


CHAP,  i]  LATE  DEVELOPMENTS  275 

story  and  write  it  from  day  to  day,  careless  of  formal 
artistry,  he  wrote  chiefly  to  please,  and,  this  attained,  he 
cared  little  whether  other  things  were  added  to  him  or 
no.  Defoe  was  a  master  of  the  picaresque  romance,  and, 
despite  his  pretence  of  moral  intention,  the  end  of  his 
tale  was  to  capture  the  taste  of  his  readers  for  the  sensa- 
tional and  scandalous.  Fielding  cannot  be  said  to  have 
any  positive  aim  in  view  save  entertainment ;  the  greater 
qualities  of  his  work  are  unconscious,  for  few  great  men 
have  been  less  self-conscious  than  he.  Smollett  alternated 
between  the  sensational  romance  and  the  novel  of  manners 
without  any  ulterior  purpose.  Sterne,  happily  for  his 
own  and  later  generations,  purposed  only  to  be  incon- 
sequent. And  neither  Scott  nor  Jane  Austen  wrote  unto 
intellectual  and  moral  edification.  Scott  was  in  his  own 
eyes  only  secondarily  a  man  of  letters,  and  he  held  no 
high  opinion  of  the  novel  as  a  form  of  literature.  Jane 
Austen  was  a  retiring  maiden-lady  with  a  sense  of  humour, 
who  never  dreamed  of  the  prophetic  call  of  practitioners 
in  fiction.  Richardson  alone  in  the  eighteenth  century 
took  himself  with  monstrous  seriousness,  and  wrote  the 
novel  first  to  instruct  and  afterwards  to  entertain.  His 
example  was  tut  slowly  followed,  though,  toward  the 
end  of  the  century,  the  influence  of  Rousseau  and  the 
French  Revolution  set  going  many  doctrinaire  novelists 
of  a  minor  order — among  them  Robert  Bage,  Thomas 
Holcroft  and  William  Godwin.  And  about  the  same  time 
novels  with  a  purpose  were  written  by  Hannah  More, 
Mrs.  Inchbald  and  Miss  Eclgeworth.  But  even  with  the 
self-important  Richardson,  and  more  with  the  others,  the 
narrative  was  regarded  in  no  other  light  than  the  spoon- 
ful of  jam  which  helped  the  patient  to  gulp  down  his 
powder. 

Scott,  the  least  didactic  of  novelists,  changed  all  this. 
With  him  the  novel  became  a  power,  and  from  the  position 
of  poor  serving-maid  to  literature  stepped  into  the  fore- 
front and  before  long  became  mistress  in  the  house.  Hugo, 
Dumas,  and  a  hundred  others  in  every  European  country 
practised  the  writing  of  historical  romance ;  and  fiction  was 
no  longer  negligible  in  comparison  with  the  sister  arts  of 
poetry  and  drama.  The  didactic  intention  grew  to  adult 
importance.  Balzac  offered  a  complete  sketch  of  human 


276  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

activities.  The  moralists  and  immoralists,  including  George 
Sand,  Feuillet,  Flaubert,  Zola,  embodied  in  fiction  didactic 
purposes,  and  the  "  heresy  of  instruction  "  was  noised 
abroad.  It  is  unnecessary  to  follow  the  story  further  in 
France — few,  even  of  those  who  accepted  the  motto  of 
Gautier,  escaped  the  obsession,  and  the  novelist  became 
a  teacher,  a  social  prophet,  a  critic  of  manners.  M. 
Anatole  France,  M.  Bourget,  M.  Andre  Gide,  to  name 
but  three,  would  disclaim  the  mere  standing  of  society 
entertainers.  In  Russia  the  story  is  the  same.  Tolstoy 
and  Dostoievsky  go  out  into  the  by-ways  and  hedges 
compelling  the  folk  to  come  in.  And  in  England  the 
current  set  early  to  this  direction.  Dickens  is  the  avowed 
novelist  with  a  purpose,  aiming  his  shafts  at  the  poor  law, 
the  debtor's  gaol,  private  schools,  chancery  administra- 
tion, hypocrisy  in  religion  and  other  failures  in  our  social 
institutions.  At  the  same  time  Thackeray  satirised 
individuals  and  social  types.  George  Eliot  as  eagerly 
uses  the  novel  to  inculcate  the  tenets  of  the  Ethical  Church 
as  Charlotte  Yonge  to  buttress  a  new  spirit  in  the  Church 
of  England.  And,  like  Richardson  or  Zola,  she  took  her- 
self with  immense  seriousness.  Meredith  and  Mr.  Thomas 
Hardy  use  the  novel  to  set  forth  their  reading  of  the  world's 
meaning,  and  make  no  concessions  to  the  weak,  the 
conventional  and  the  unintellectual  brother.  The  ten- 
dency to  treat  narrative  as  nothing  save  the  vehicle  of 
philosophy  and  instruction  grew,  till  the  moral  came  first 
and  the  story  was  written  to  force  it  home.  This  is  the 
state  of  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward,  Miss  Marie  Corelli,  Mr. 
John  Galsworthy  and  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells.  Mr.  Wells  has 
promised  us  the  early  death  of  novels  written  only  as 
works  of  art,  reflecting  life  for  its  own  sake,  detached 
from  prejudices  and  ethical  principles  of  the  author.  The 
novel  of  the  future  is  to  assume  the  functions  of  the  pulpit 
and  the  platform,  to  exhort,  to  guide  and  to  restrain. 
And  he  has  illustrated  his  theory  in  didactic  tractates 
like  The  New  Machiavelli  and  Marriage.  Thus  the  romance 
of  Defoe  and  the  art  of  Flaubert  have  been  sacrificed  at 
the  altar  of  the  demagogue  and  preacher. 

But  the  end  is  not  yet.  No  work  has  survived  the 
ordeal  of  the  centuries  which  did  not  add  to  its  contem- 
porary appeal  the  claim  of  creative  imagination  and 


CHAP,  i]  LATE  DEVELOPMENTS  277 

artistic  form.  Plato's  philosophy,  for  most  men,  weighs 
as  nothing  in  the  balance  compared  with  the  consummate 
beauty  of  his  style  and  the  art  of  his  dialogue.  Criticism 
and  instruction,  like  grammar,  follow  the  thing  made. 
Language  takes  upon  it  new  forms  and  grammars  quickly 
become  obsolete.  Novels  whose  primary  business  is  a 
criticism  or  an  exhortation  based  on  contemporary  life 
and  events,  have,  unless  inadvertently  they  are  also 
works  of  art,  no  more  importance  to  literature  than  the 
leaflet  distributed  at  revival  meetings  or  the  printed 
matter  sent  out  by  advertising  firms  and  dignified  by  the 
name  of  "  literature."  In  proportion  to  the  author's 
power  of  imitating,  scandalising  or  entertaining  they  will 
enjoy  a  few  years  of  life  before  they  lose  all  significance 
under  the  conditions  of  a  new  age,  when  men  have  other 
problems  to  consider.  Art  has  no  direct  concern  with 
passing  problems  in  politics,  morals  and  social  economics  ; 
its  foundations  are  fixed  upon  the  unchanging  in  human 
nature — emotional  reaction  to  experience.  And  this 
emotional  reaction  is  always  the  same.  The  triumph  of 
the  financier  on  the  Stock  Exchange  is  essentially  the 
savage  pleasure  of  his  aboriginal  forefather  when  he  slew 
his  prey  with  a  flint -headed  spear  ;  the  joy  of  the  aeronaut 
in  swift  flight  differs  in  nothing  from  the  ecstasy  of  the 
Indian  shooting  broken  rapids  in  a  frail  canoe.  The 
insight  of  the  creative  artist  carries  him  beyond  the  curtain 
of  the  visible  to  the  eternal  that  is  in  human  nature 
under  all  varieties  of  experience,  for  his  end  is  not  photo- 
graphic realism  but  the  imago  veritatis.  And  this  faculty 
belongs  only  to  the  genius  who  appears  but  seldom. 
Hundreds  of  novelists  can  render  life  accurately  as  it 
appears  to  most  men  ;  but  the  stronger  emotion  which 
binds  the  meaning  of  the  individual  to  the  meaning  of 
the  whole  lies  outside  their  cognisance.  Fiction  of  the 
lower  order  is  a  pen-and-ink  sketch,  a  journalistic  report 
of  the  things  that  happen — nothing  is  created  from  the 
limbeck  of  the  imagination.  The  one  invariable  result 
of  the  contact  of  genius  with  the  common  experience 
of  life  is  the  introduction  into  the  world  of  a  new  idea, 
a  new  vision.  Nobody  can  again  regard  humanity  in  the 
same  light  who  has  once  met  with  Falstaff — it  is  an 
enlargement  of  the  mental  and  emotional  horizon.  The 


278  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

realistic  and  non-creative  artist  leaves  everything  as  it 
was  before. 

It  has  been  predicted  that  the  novel  has  seen  its  day 
and  must  decline.  This  despair  has  no  justification  :  it 
is  as  probable  that  the  great  novels  yet  remain  to  be 
written.  Though  fiction  has  usurped  much  of  the  realm 
once  held  in  fealty  to  poetry,  drama  and  the  essay,  great 
poetry  is  still  being  written,  and  perhaps  great  drama. 
The  comprehensiveness  and  elasticity  of  the  novel  is  its 
recommendation ;  it  has,  therefore,  been  chosen  as  a 
form  of  self-expression  by  a  number  of  the  greatest  of 
modern  minds.  If  the  fact  that  the  writing  of  the 
novel  seems  to  call  for  no  special  knowledge,  no  scholar- 
ship, no  training,  has  led  to  an  inrush  of  the  mediocre 
and  incompetent,  this  argues  nothing  against  the  value 
of  a  novel  by  a  Fielding  or  a  Tolstoy.  There  is  as  much 

J  V 

difference  between  Tom,  Jones  and  any  one  of  the  many 
hundreds  of  the  season's  novels  at  the  library,  as  there  is 
between  Othello  and  a  bad  melodrama.  Nor,  because  it 
appears  easy,  is  there  any  need  to  dismiss  the  novel  as 
the  lowest  of  all  the  forms  of  art.  Every  sincere  expres- 
sion of  emotion  and  thought  in  art  is  legitimate.  Art  is 
always  art,  poetry  is  always  poetry  in  whatever  form. 
What  fails  to  be  art  may  be  good  craftsmanship  ;  and 
most  novels  are  this  and  no  more. 

It  was  natural  that  in  early  stages  the  novel  should 
evolve  its  peculiar  characteristics  and  potentialities 
rapidly.  From  Defoe  to  Sterne  it  travelled  a  longer 
journey  than  it  has  since  been  destined  to  traverse.  At 
each  stage  in  evolution  toward  a  greater  elaboration  and 
exactness  the  power  required  to  advance  another  step  is 
enormously  increased,  just  as  the  great  liner  must  burn 
an  indefinitely  greater  quantity  of  coal  to  add  another 
knot  to  her  speed  after  a  certain  point  has  been  reached. 
With  growing  complexity  in  life  and  the  expression  of 
life  in  art  changes  must  show  themselves  more  slowly. 
And,  therefore,  to  many  the  art  of  the  novel  may  seem 
to  be  suspended  or  exhausted.  Like  a  ship  becalmed  on 
a  sea  we  wait.  But  the  wind  never  fails  at  the  last  to 
ripple  the  water. 

Mediocre  fiction  more  easily  than  any  other  form  of 
the  literary  art  wins  its  brief  day  of  popularity  before 


CHAP,  i]  LATE  DEVELOPMENTS  279 

it  is  consigned  to  oblivion.  Each  season  brings  its  epoch- 
making  books,  which  yield  to  others  in  the  season  that 
follows.  Only  a  few  novels  in  any  century  can  have  a 
meaning  a  hundred  years  after  they  are  written.  Five 
or  six  English  novelists  of  the  eighteenth  century,  at  the 
most,  should  be  known  to  any  ordinarily  well-read  man, 
and  perhaps  seven  or  eight  who  belong  to  the  nineteenth. 
The  rest  are  going  or  gone.  Where  are  the  novels  of 
Bulwer  Lytton,  Disraeli,  Wilkie  Collins,  William  Black  ? 
The  snows  of  yester-year  are  more  fresh  to  the  memory 
of  all  but  the  few,  the  few  for  whom  the  knowledge  of 
literature  is  a  profession.  These  are  gone,  or  nearly, 
for  they  created  nothing  out  of  the  unknown. 

Writers  of  prose-fiction  mentioned  in  the  chapters 
which  follow  form  a  large  rally,  and  the  names  omitted 
are  legion.  Of  those  who  find  a  place  here  the  greater 
number  will  be  forgotten  in  a  few  decades.  But  for  all 
men  the  game  must  be  for  the  hour  that  is  given  :  if  we 
work  for  posterity  it  can  only  be  by  remembering  the 
present. 


CHAPTER  II 

NEW-COMERS 

$  1 .  Oscar  Wilde— George  Moore — George  Gissing — Rudyard  Kipling — 

Samuel  Butler. 

§  2.  Watts-Dunton— '  Mark  Rutherford.' 
§  3.  Hubert    Crackanthorpe — Henry  Harland — Ernest    Dowson — H.   D. 

Lowry — Arthur  Symons — John  Davidson — Max  Beerbohm — Laurence 

Housman — Bernard  Shaw. 
§  4.   Cunninghame  Graham — W.  H.  Hudson — Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch 

—  Sir  Henry  Rider  Haggard  —  Baring-Gould  —  Sir  Arthur  Conan 

Doyle — Sir  Gilbert  Parker — Henry  Seton  Merriman — Grant  Allen 

— Israel  Zangwill — W.  E.  Tirebuck. 
§  5.  David  Christie  Murray — Sir  Hall  Caine — Frankfort  Moore — E.  F. 

Benson  —  Morley   Roberts  —  '  F.    Anstey '  —  Jerome  K.  Jerome  — 

W.  W.  Jacobs. 
§  6.  Stevenson,  Macdonald,  Black — William  Sharpe — Neil  Munro — Sir 

James  Barrie — '  Ian  Maclaren ' — S.  R.  Crockett — f  George  Douglas ' 

— J.  H.  Findlater  and  Mary  Findlater. 


IN  1870,  the  year  of  Dickens'  death,  the  first  era  of  the 
Victorian  novel  came  to  an  end.  After  this  date  George 
Eliot  produced  the  lengthy  kaleidoscope  of  Middlemarch 
and  the  interesting  but  second-rate  study  of  Daniel 
Deronda.  Her  truly  creative  period  as  an  artist  closed 
many  years  before  with  Silas  Marner  (1861).  Charlotte 
Bronte  had  been  dead  some  years  before  George  Eliot 
appeared  as  a  novelist :  had  she  lived  her  influence 
would  in  all  probability  have  hastened  developments 
which  are  first  clearly  marked  in  her  novels,  and  later 
become  common  to  most  writers  of  prose-fiction  of  any 
importance.!  She  always  writes  as  if  what  she  had  to  say 
were  vital,  not  merely  a  matter  of  interest.  The  iterated 
note  of  personal  conviction,  first  intensified  in  Charlotte 
Bronte,  has  been  adopted  by  the  didactic,  hortatory  or 
psychological  novelist  of  to-day.  Further,  her  novels  are 
constructed  upon  a  conflict  of  character  between  two  or 
three  personalities,  and  the  wider  canvas  of  the  older 

281 


282  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

novelist  is  abandoned.  Yet  after  her  Meredith  continued, 
despite  the  modern  and  twentieth- century  habit  of  his 
thinking,  to  write  in  the  older,  the  broader  and  more 
diffuse  manner  ;  and  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  although  he 
carried  the  English  novel  a  stage  on  its  way  in  the  art  of 
concentration  and  construction,  still  brought  within  the 
central  interest  of  his  greater  novels  a  large  number  of 
characters. 

Meredith  and  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy  have  been  the  two 
most  powerful  influences  upon  English  prose-fiction  in 
the  last  twenty-five  years  :    nearly  every 
Oscar  Wilde,          novelist  has  assimilated  something  from 
1856-1900.  one  or  the  other,  or  from  both,  introduc- 

ing characteristics  proper  to  himself  so 
far  as  he  was  able  to  discover  them.  But  thirty  years  ago 
neither  Meredith  nor  Mr.  Hardy  had  reached  the  dominat- 
ing position  they  were  destined  to  attain  later.  After  the 
decline  of  the  Victorian  novel  proper  with  the  death  of 
George  Eliot,  the  chief  tendencies  traceable  come  from 
France,  and  declare  themselves  as  an  aesthetic  impressionism 
or  drab  realism,  or  a  combination  of  the  two.  The  purely 
aesthetic  novel  is  as  little  tolerable  finally  as  a  cake  com- 
posed only  of  sugar  icing  ;  for  the  ground  of  the  novel 
must  be  an  experience  of  humanity  in  the  rough,  and 
with  this  the  hot-house  plant  of  aestheticism  has  little  in 
common.  The  novel  that  may  be  defined  as  pure  sestheti- 
cism,  for  the  want  of  a  better  term,  has  been  practised 
by  Mr.  Richard  le  Gallienne  and  others,  but  their  attempts 
are  of  small  importance  or  value,  and  the  signal  example 
of  this  kind  of  writing  is  to  be  found  in  Oscar  Wilde. 
Lord  Arthur  Sadie's  Crime  (1891)  is  hardly  to  be  counted 
a  novel,  for  the  whole  matter  is  on  the  level  of  The  Canter- 
ville  Ghost,  and  only  redeemed  by  extraordinary  ingenuity 
and  ironic  wit  which  make  it  one  of  the  most  brilliant 
pieces  of  writing  to  which  Wilde  ever  put  his  hand.  In 
itself,  however,  it  is  but  an  amusing  and  paradoxical  jeu 
d'esprit  (garnished  with  twisted  proverbial  epigrams)  in 
its  picture  of  the  man  who  calmly  commits  murder  from 
a  clear  sense  of  duty  to  the  future  happiness  of  the  woman 
he  is  to  wed.  The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray  (1891)  is  Wilde's 
only  novel.  "  I  wrote  that,"  he  said,  "  in  a  few  days, 
because  a  friend  of  mine  declared  I  could  not  write  a 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  283 

novel."  And  Dorian  Gray  bears  traces  of  rapid  produc- 
tion in  the  unnecessary  length  and  tediousness  (an  art 
Wilde  did  not  deliberately  cultivate)  of  much  of  the 
dialogue,  and  in  the  absence  of  proportion  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  narrative.  It  is  possible  to  believe  that  when 
Dorian  Gray  was  new  it  made  a  stir.  The  luscious  sug- 
gestiveness  of  much  of  the  writing  was  certain  to  please 
some  and  shock  others  ;  but  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that 
it  was  ever  an  interesting  book  to  read  through  at  a 
sitting-;  and  Lord  Henry  Wotton's  epigrams  are  below 
the  standard  Wilde  was  capable  of  reaching,  save  for  a 
few  which  are  of  his  best  quality — outwardly  vain  and 
trivial  they  contain  clear  insight  and  good  philosophy  of 
everyday  life.  Dorian  Gray  was  written  against  a  bet, 
and  it  has  all  the  appearance  of  hasty  work,  except  in 
the  elaborate  colour  and  wealth  of  the  famous  eleventh 
chapter.  Even  as  a  diploma  piece  in  the  art  of  aesthetic 
impressionism  Dorian  Gray  is  not  very  striking.  Its 
inspiration  is  purely  literary  and  drawn  from  Huysmans' 
A  Rebours.  It  is  beautiful,  it  is  untrue,  it  is  lifeless, 
using  that  word  in  its  strict  sense.  Wilde  had  the 
power  of  observation,  the  faculties  of  sincerity  and 
sympathy;  but  he  walked  deliberately  in  the  blinkers  of 
that  art  which  is  a  lie,  with  the  result  that  he  wrote  no 
fiction  and  no  drama  which  excites  any  but  an  intellectual 
interest.  Even  the  suggestiveness  of  Dorian  Gray  is 
purely  intellectual,  and  has  no  part  with  the  manner  of 
Sterne,  Gautier  and  Maupassant.  Wilde  lived  not  the 
life  of  the  emotions,  but  of  intellectual  imagination  and 
the  lie.  Neither  in  fiction  nor  in  drama  has  he  created  a 
single  entirely  credible  character  ;  and  in  this  he  would 
have  gloried,  for  he  held  that  while  we  may  believe  in  the 
impossible  the  probable  will  never  command  our  assent. 
He  summed  up  the  nature  of  his  own  achievement  when 
he  declared  that  he  kept  his  talent  only  for  his  books 
and  put  his  genius  into  his  life. 

Wilde  used  his  talent  audaciously,  throwing  out  his 
net  on  all  sides.  He  borrowed  much  from  France,  but 
his  primary  debt  in  youth  was  to  Pater  and  the  Pre- 
Raphaelities ;  he  put  little  into  his  writing  that  he 
borrowed  directly  from  an  independent  observation  of 
life.  He  bent  nearly  all  his  genius  to  a  pose  ;  and,  despite 


284  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

his  high  gifts,  the  whole  after-effect  of  his  work  has  been 
narrowly  confined.  When  Wilde  was  at  the  height  of 
his  fame  the  most  important  new  manifestation  in  English 
fiction  was  an  impressionistic  realism  due  to  French 
influences  ;  and  the  greatest  work  in  this  vein  is  to  be 
found  in  the  earlier  novels  of  Mr.  George  Moore,  while  a 
band  of  younger  writers,  many  connected  with  the  Yellow 
Book,  followed  in  the  same  path.  As  in  the  poetry,  so  in 
the  fiction  of  the  period  the  common  tendency  was  to 
worship  the  god  of  things  as  they  are,  and  attempt  to 
render  life  by  a  cumulative  register  of  the  exact  facts. 
To  this  impulse  we  owe  Gissing's  drab  pictures  of  middle- 
class  life,  Mr.  Kipling's  romantic  and  adventurous  realism, 
and  the  satiric  realism  of  Samuel  Butler.  Butler  was  not 
much  known  or  regarded  till  many  years  later,  but  he 
was  doing  his  real  work  contemporaneously  with  the  best 
writing  of  those  whom  we  have  just  named,  and  it  is  now 
possible  to  see  that  in  independence  and  intellectual  force 
he  was  one  of  the  most  notable  prose-writers  of  the  last 
century. 

Of  recent  years  Zola  has  fallen  into  a  slough  of  dis- 
credit, and  Mr.  George  Moore,  the  most  important  example 

of  English  discipleship  to  Zola,  has  suffered 
George  Moore,  with  his  master.  A  Mummer's  Wife  and 
b.  1853.  Esther  Waters  were  once  novels  heartily 

admired  or  heartily  detested  by  every- 
body, for  the  name  of  the  author  stood  for  a  well-defined 
intention  in  literary  methods.  Other  aims  and  other 
ideals  have  come,  and  Mr.  Moore  has  fallen  into  a 
period  of  comparative  neglect,  partly  because  he  is  not 
led  by  a  single  idea  and  refuses  to  cling  obstinately 
to  lopsided  enthusiasms.  His  chief  weakness  is  a  sen- 
sitive receptiveness  tempered  by  a  sane  and  unenthu- 
siastic  spirit  of  criticism.  The  result  is  marked  in  several 
changes  of  front  in  the  course  of  his  literary  life.  He  began 
to  write  novels  under  the  influence  of  a  profound  admira- 
tion for  Zola  ;  in  course  of  time  Zola  was  dispossessed 
and  Balzac  came  to  his  own  ;  in  the  middle  period,  with 
novels  like  Evelyn  Innes  and  Sister  Teresa,  Mr.  Moore 
wrote  slowly  elaborated  psychological  study ;  the  enthu- 
siasm of  the  Irish  Movement  caught  him,  and  he  wrote 
the  charming  Untilled  Field  and  The  Lake ;  and,  lastly, 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  285 

disillusioned  of  hopes  in  the  literary  renascence  of  Ireland, 
he  turned  to  criticise  the  movement  with  a  friendly  irony. 
The  moods  and  the  beliefs  of  Mr.  Moore  have  changed 
many  times,  but  each  mood  and  faith  has  been  shaped 
by  a  temperament  personal  to  himself,  betraying  no 
indefiniteness.  The  story  of  his  intellectual  alternations 
is  not  difficult  to  follow  ;  it  is  clearly  printed  on  the  pages 
of  his  novels,  and,  further,  Mr.  Moore  has  written  his 
autobiography  many  times,  with  a  pleasure  in  talking 
of  himself  hardly  rivalled  by  Stevenson.  In  1904  he 
supplied  a  preface  to  a  new  edition  of  Confessions  of  a 
Young  Man,  first  published  in  1888.  "  Here,"  he  writes, 
"  ye  shall  find  me,  the  germs  of  all  I  have  written  are 
in  the  Confessions,  Esther  Waters  and  Modern  Painting, 
my  love  of  France — the  country  as  Pater  would  say  of 
my  instinctive  election — and  all  my  prophecies."  Here 
is  pictured  the  youthful  egoist,  happy  in  freedom  to 
shape  his  own  plans  in  life  from  an  early  age,  dreaming 
and  finding  his  way  toward  art  in  detachment  from  the 
influences  of  his  country,  till  he  almost  lost  familiarity 
with  his  native  tongue.  In  Paris  he  gained  his  first  strong 
literary  impressions  from  Hugo,  De  Musset,  Gautier, 
Theodore  de  Banville,  Baudelaire,  Zola  and  Balzac.  The 
influence  of  Zola  was  in  the  ascendent  when  Mr.  Moore 
first  tried  his  hand  in  fiction ;  but,  while  from  time  to  time 
he  has  recanted  faith  in  other  gods  to  whom  once  he 
offered  worship,  Balzac  has  never  wholly  been  disowned. 
He  can  write  :  "Of  those  I  have  loved  deeply  there  is 
but  one  that  still  may  thrill  me  with  the  old  passion,  with 
the  first  ecstasy — it  is  Balzac."  Mr.  Moore  has  never 
found  himself  wholly  at  home  in  his  own  country : 
native  temperament  led  him  from  the  first  to  sympathy 
with  French  literature  and  French  views  of  life.  When  a 
young  man  he  found  little  in  contemporary  English 
writers,  though  he  asserts,  deceiving  himself,  that  to 
Marius  the  Epicurean  he  owed  "  the  last  temple  "  of  his 
soul.  He  has  since  burned  incense  at  other  altars  in 
other  temples,  and  with  equal  fervour  ;  but  beneath  the 
changes  the  mingling  of  clear-sighted  criticism  and  per- 
sonal prejudice  has  altered  little  in  its  character.  The 
Confessions  displays  the  tireless  egoism  of  Mr.  Moore, 
his  sensitiveness  to  external  influences,  his  scepticism  of 


286  THE  NOVEL  [PART  rsr 

any  enthusiasms  save  his  own,  and  finally  of  these, 
his  dislike  for  the  domestic  literature  of  his  age,  his 
devotion  to  France,  and  his  discovery,  repeated  many 
years  later  in  Salve,  that  no  great  literature  has  been 
written  by  Roman  Catholics  since  the  time  of  the 
Reformation. 

Mr.  Moore  took  up  his  autobiography  again  with 
Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life  (1906),  and  followed  this  with 
the  trilogy  named  Hail  and  Farewell  (1911-1914).  The 
Memoirs  is  the  most  sentimental  of  Mr.  Moore's  books, 
the  book  which  best  illustrates  the  author's  complacent 
delight  in  regarding  "  the  ruins  of  George  Moore  by  moon- 
light "  —to  use  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton's  happy  phrase.  As 
Mr.  Moore  tries  to  summon  up  the  ghost  of  his  dead  self, 
his  affectations  grow  upon  him  ;  and  the  callousness  of 
intellectual  sentimentality,  suffered  to  reach  a  rank 
luxuriance,  is  exhibited  in  the  unfeeling  comment  of  the 
author,  when  he  learns  that  he  has  arrived  home  too 
late  to  see  his  mother  alive  :  "  Not  altogether  bad  news," 
I  said  to  myself ;  "  my  mother  is  dead,  but  I  have  been 
saved  the  useless  pain,  the  torture  of  spirit  I  should  have 
endured  if  I  had  arrived  in  time."  Of  a  finer  order  in 
every  way  as  literature  are  Ave  (1911),  Salve  (1912)  and 
Vale  (1914),  in  which  the  scene  is  transferred  to  Ireland, 
and  Mr.  Moore  writes  of  the  Irish  literary  movement 
and  its  leaders,  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats,  A.  E.  and  others.  In 
these  volumes  of  reminiscence  the  egotistic  sentimentalism 
disappears,  the  thought  is  strong  and  clear,  and  characters 
are  vividly  sketched  in  with  a  deft  satiric  touch.  After 
betraying  some  difficulty  in  getting  under  weigh  Mr.  Moore 
gathers  the  differing  strands  of  these  books  skilfully 
together,  and  writes  in  a  style  immeasurably  superior  to 
his  early  work.  He  writes  as  the  candid  friend  in  the 
house  of  the  Irish  movement,  pointing  out  the  family 
weaknesses  and  predicting  inevitable  failure  in  the  future. 
Though  he  sees  clearly  that  the  movement  can  never 
realise  itself,  his  commentary  on  its  failure  is  not  the  charm 
of  these  books — it  lies  in  the  portraiture  of  men.  Mr. 
Moore  has  drawn  nothing  with  finer  insight  and  strength 
than  the  figure  of  A.  E.,  the  beautiful  poet,  imbued  with  a 
high  faith  in  the  ancient  gods,  a  profound  mysticism, 
and  a  practical  genius  for  taking  his  part  in  everyday 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  287 

life  and  promoting  co-operative  societies.  It  may  be 
questioned  whether  Hail  and  Farewell,  which  makes  copy, 
ha  f  satirically,  half  sympathetically,  out  of  friends,  is 
dictated  by  the  finest  feeling,  but,  waiving  this  and  adopt- 
ing a  more  impersonal  standpoint,  these  volumes  are  to  be 
counted  with  the  better  class  of  literary  autobiography, 
far  above  the  ordinary  volume  of  reminiscence  which 
adds  new  terrors  to  the  lives  of  contemporaries.  The 
popular  appeal  is  weaker  than  in  Mr.  Moore's  earlier 
memoirs  and  the  novels,  but  his  fine  gifts  in  style  and 
literary  manner  have  never  been  shown  to  better  advan- 
tage than  in  the  discursive  medley  of  Hail  and  Farewell ; 
for  the  form  affords  the  author  a  ready  opportunity  of 
combining  fiction  and  criticism,  and  in  either  field,  as 
novelist  or  literary  and  artistic  critic,  Mr.  Moore's  work 
has  been  striking  and  individual. 

He  began  in  the  conventional  and  accepted  manner 
by  publishing  poetry — Flowers  of  Passion  (1878)  and 
Pagan  Poems  (1881) — but  with  a  wisdom,  which  if  shared 
by  many  would  ease  the  bitterness  of  life,  he  soon  realised 
that  "  minor  poetry  is  not  sufficient  occupation  for  a  life- 
time "  ;  and  although,  notably  in  '  The  Sweetness  of  the 
Past,'  he  has  not  failed  to  write  true  poetry,  these  collec- 
tions of  verse  show  that  he  did  wisely  in  turning  to  prose. 
His  verse  reflects  nothing  that  may  not  be  found  else- 
where, whereas  his  prose  never  lacks  interest  and  in- 
dividuality. A  Modern  Lover  (1883)  and  A  Mummer's 
Wife  (1884)  were  written  during  Mr.  Moore's  apprentice- 
ship to  Zola,  a  servitude  which  he  cast  off  before  writing 
the  Confessions  ;  but  at  this  stage  he  was  fast  bound. 
A  Mummer  s  Wife  opens  with  a  scene  drawn  in  the  machine- 
made  and  undiscerning  manner  of  Zola.  A  woman  is 
watching  by  the  bedside  of  her  husband  who  lies  tortured 
with  the  paroxysms  of  a  bronchial  cough.  The  dirty 
room,  the  fetid  atmosphere,  the  repulsive  medicine  bottles, 
the  exasperating  cough  are  all  described  with  hair-breadth 
exactness.  It  is  well  done  ;  and,  if  worth  doing,  Zola 
could  not  have  bettered  it.  The  story  proceeds  with  the 
fortunes  of  the  sick  man's  wife  who  falls  in  love  with 
a  travelling  actor,  elopes  with  him  and  gradually  sinks 
into  drunken  wretchedness.  It  is  a  sordid  and  dreary 
tale,  and  Mr.  Moore  follows  his  master  even  to  the  neglect 


288  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

of  style  ;  but  the  power  of  the  book  there  is  no  gain- 
saying. The  very  baldness  of  the  style  is  perhaps  an 
advantage  in  depicting  scenes  so  shabby,  threadbare  and 
unpleasing.  Mr.  Moore  succeeds  by  the  exact  register  of 
each  detail  in  printing  the  background  of  his  tale  upon 
the  imagination.  In  uncompromising  and  powerful 
vividness  he  has  never  surpassed  the  description  of  the 
child  dying  of  convulsions  in  its  cot,  while  the  drunken 
mother  rolls  on  her  bed,  and  the  merciless  green  moon- 
light pours  into  the  room.  The  age  shuddered,  and  Mr. 
Moore  was  classed  with  Zola,  the  most  lewd  of  writers. 
But  the  strength  of  the  book  compelled  recognition ; 
although  in  many  respects  it  is  imitative  copy,  with 
Flaubert  and  Zola  carefully  remembered  on  each  page, 
it  has  a  force  and  directness  in  gaining  effects  which  Mr. 
Moore  has  never  wholly  reached  again.  Its  successor, 
A  Drama  in  Muslin  (1886),  though  labelled  "  realistic  " 
for  our  information,  is  so  in  a  different  sense ;  Mr.  Moore's 
method  of  studying  girl  life  among  the  gentry  classes  of 
Ireland  by  throwing  a  group  of  girls  into  high  relief  and 
sinking  the  environing  men  is  unnatural,  and  this  is  not 
one  of  his  successful  studies  in  character  and  temperament. 
It  was  not  till  ten  years  after  A  Mummer's  Wife  that 
Mr.  Moore  published  another  book  which  created  a  stir 
of  indignation  and  admiration — Esther  Waters  (1894). 
Before  writing  the  earlier  book  he  had  gathered  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  travelling  actor's  life  and  habits  :  in 
Esther  Waters  he  worked  up  his  notes  of  the  race-course 
and  the  betting-ring  ;  and  the  story  of  the  servant  girl 
who  meets  with  trouble  has  no  essential  relation  to  the 
background  of  the  novel.  Psychological  study  of  character 
is  slighter  in  Esther  Waters  than  in  A  Mummer's  Wife. 
We  learn  little  that  is  convincing  of  the  influence  upon 
Esther,  who  has  been  trained  among  the  Plymouth 
Brethren,  of  her  introduction  to  the  servants  of  a  racing 
household.  In  A  Mummer's  Wife  the  change  of  mind 
and  moral  standard  in  the  wife  of  the  little  draper,  when 
she  is  suddenly  transported  into  the  atmosphere  of  a 
third-rate  theatrical  company,  is  worked  out  with  fine 
precision  and  truthfulness.  Esther  Waters  brought  Mr. 
Moore  greater  fame,  but  A  Mummer's  Wife  is  the  stronger 
book.  After  we  depart  from  the  servants'  hall  in  the 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  289 

earlier  chapters  of  Esther  Waters  hardly  a  character  has 
interest,  save  the  heroine  of  the  tale. 

With  Esther  Waters  Mr.  Moore  closed  his  first  period  as 
a  novelist,  the  period  in  which,  to  use  the  word  he  adopted 
to  himself,  his  method  was  realistic.  A  second  stage  and 
new  influences  are  marked  by  Evelyn  Innes  (1898)  and 
its  sequel,  Sister  Teresa  (1901).  His  manner  in  character- 
drawing  is  no  longer  that  with  which  he  began  in  A 
Mummer's  Wife,  where  the  line  is  hard  and  inflexible 
and  the  shadows  black.  If  we  may  compare  with  the 
art  of  painting,  the  best  qualities  of  A  Mummer's  Wife 
are  those  of  Hogarth,  the  worst  the  quantities  of  meaning- 
less black  paint  with  which  earlier  German  artists  delighted 
to  daub  the  canvas.  In  Evelyn  Innes  the  characterisation 
is  more  complex  and  elaborate  in  execution  ;  Mr.  Moore 
is  more  anxious  and  uncertain,  because  he  sets  himself  a 
more  difficult  task.  Evelyn  Innes,  an  educated  woman 
and  an  operatic  singer  with  a  European  fame,  is  a  suf- 
ficiently different  figure  from  the  runaway  tradesman's  wife, 
and  in  her  Mr.  Moore  has  succeeded  in  reaching  his  most 
penetrating  study  of  womanhood.  But  his  success  is  not 
complete,  for  he  writes  in  a  mood  too  critical  for  the 
artist,  and,  little  as  he  may  be  ready  to  admit  it,  he 
labours  under  the  influence  of  Henry  James  and  Henry 
James's  chief  weakness  of  shapeless  inconclusiveness. 
And  too  often  Mr.  Moore  strays  into  criticism  of  Wagner, 
discussions  upon  the  art  of  music  and  the  place  of  the 
sexual  instinct  in  music — questions  which  might  better 
have  found  a  place  in  a  volume  of  essays.  Sister  Teresa 
is  hardly  a  sequel  to  Evelyn  Innes,  but  a  continuation  of 
the  same  story  in  a  different  volume  and  under  a  different 
title.  The  singer  and  actress  of  the  first  volume  has 
become  a  nun.  The  author's  aim  is  to  study  the  influence 
of  the  meagre  pieties  of  conventual  life  upon  a  woman 
capable  of  art,  passions  and  sins.  Faith  and  enthusiasm 
are  followed  by  doubt  and  contempt  for  the  silliness  of  the 
nuns.  She  discovers  that  she  has  exchanged  the  trivialities 
of  society  for  the  trivialities  of  the  convent,  and  her  spirit 
is  tortured  with  loss  of  faith  in  the  real  presence  in  the 
sacrament.  The  opportunity  of  escaping  from  the  convent 
in  thrown  in  her  way.  The  portress  leaves  the  keys  on  a 
nail.  Evelyn  Innes.  now  Sister  Teresa,  opens  the  door. 


290  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

"  At  that  moment  the  pigeons  left  their  roosts  and 
flew  towards  the  fields.  The  fields  were  shining  in  the 
morning  light ;  thrush  and  cuckoo  were  calling,  the 
spring  moved  among  the  first  primroses,  and  Evelyn 
stood  watching  the  spring-tide. 

"  She  had  only  to  take  a  step  to  regain  her  life  in 
the  world,  but  she  could  not  take  that  step.  She  no 
longer  even  seemed  to  desire  it.  In  the  long  months 
she  had  been  kept  waiting  a  change  had  taken  place 
in  her.  She  felt  that  something  had  broken  in  her, 
and  she  closed  the  door,  and  having  locked  it  she  hung 
the  keys  on  the  nail." 

In  that  conclusion  is  contained  Mr.  Moore's  attitude 
toward  the  faith  of  his  native  country — its  final  result  is 
to  sap  character  and  weaken  initiative.  Protestantism 
and  Agnosticism  leave  the  mind  free.  And  when,  under 
new  influences,  Mr.  Moore  began  to  write  of  Ireland, 
this  thought  lay  continually  in  the  background  of  his 
work.  But  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  is  of  little 
importance  in  Sister  Teresa  ;  the  strength  of  the  book 
lies  in  the  mastery  with  which  the  subject  is  handled — 
the  gradual  and  slow  collapse  of  a  fine  and  beautiful 
nature.  Despite  his  early  courses  Mr.  Moore  is  by  instinct 
more  a  disciple  of  Flaubert  than  Zola,  and  his  manner 
in  this  stage  of  his  development  recalls  the  author  of 
Madame  Bovary,  schooled  by  later  students  of  feminine 
psychology,  and  among  them  Henry  James. 

The  relation  of  the  Catholic  Faith  to  the  impulsive 
and  passionate  in  human  nature  is  the  ground  of  character 
study  in  Sister  Teresa,  and  this  motif  is  carried  over  into 
the  novels  Mr.  Moore  wrote  after  he  fell,  for  a  brief  period, 
under  the  influence  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  The  short  stories 
of  The  Untilled  Field  (1903)  exhibit  the  healthy  instincts 
of  man  checked  by  sacerdotalism  ;  and  in  the  poetical 
romance  of  The  Lake  (1905)  we  see  a  priest  first  discover- 
ing his  nature  as  a  man  when  he  becomes  conscious  of 
sex.  It  is  difficult,  however,  to  believe  that  the  thoughts 
and  emotions  of  Father  Oliver  Gogarty,  who  falls  in  love 
with  the  schoolmistress  of  his  parish,  are  wholly  his  own 
for  something  of  the  Parisian  when  he  thinks  of  women 
mingles  with  the  ideas  of  the  seminary  priest,  Father 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  291 

Oliver  abandons  his  Church,  not  because  he  has  learned 
an  intellectual  doubt  of  her  doctrines,  but  because  he  is 
a  man  of  sensitive  character  fascinated  by  the  body  as 
well  as  the  soul  of  Rose  Leicester,  and  his  fall  from  grace 
brings  doctrines  toppling  down  in  a  common  catastrophe. 
Only  three  characters  in  the  book  are  of  any  account — 
Father  Oliver,  Rose  Leicester  and  Moran,  the  curate, 
who  is  cursed  with  spasmodic  temptations  to  drink.  The 
villagers,  so  far  as  they  appear,  are  shadows,  people  made 
in  the  study  by  a  writer  who  knows  nothing  about  them. 
But  if  he  fails  to  render  the  peasantry  Mr.  Moore  describes 
the  country-side  of  Ireland  with  great  beauty.  The  story 
of  Father  Oliver  is  directly  opposed  to  the  tragedy  of 
Sister  Teresa's  life.  He  resolves  to  leave  the  Church, 
and  to  Rose,  the  cause  of  his  defection,  he  writes  : 

"  I  began  to  look  upon  myself  as  a  somewhat  super- 
ficial person  whose  religious  beliefs  had  yielded  before 
the  charm  of  a  pretty  face  and  a  winsome  personality. 
But  this  view  of  the  question  no  longer  seems  super- 
ficial. The  very  contrary  seems  true.  And  the  superficial 
ones  are  those  who  think  that  it  is  only  in  the  Scriptures 
that  we  may  discover  whether  we  have  a  right  to  live. 
Our  belief  in  books  rather  than  in  Nature  is  one  of 
humanity's  most  curious  characteristics,  and  a  very 
irreligious  one,  it  seems  to  me  ;  and  I  am  glad  to  think 
it  was  your  sunny  face  that  raised  up  my  crushed 
instincts,  that  brought  me  back  to  life,  and  ever  since 
you  have  been  associated  in  my  mind  with  the  sun 
and  the  spring-tide." 

Father  Oliver  is  the  most  entirely  lovable  character 
created  by  Mr.  Moore,  and  the  book  in  which  he  is  pro- 
tagonist, abandoning  realism,  is  frankly  poetic  and 
romantic  treatment  of  psychological  character  study. 
Real  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  word  the  characters  are 
not,  for  their  letters  embody  ideas  belonging  to  an  experi- 
ence far  wider  than  their  own,  and  Rose  Leicester  writes 
too  well.  But  this  is  a  fault  inherent  in  all  epistolary 
narrative  from  the  time  of  Richardson. 

Since  Mr.  Moore  appeared  nearly  thirty  years  ago  as 
the  first  champion  in  this  country  of  Zola,  Flaubert  and 
the  French  realists  theories  and  ideals  in  fiction  have 


292  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

changed  more  than  once,  and  not  least  with  Mr.  Moore 
himself.  He  has  lived  long  enough  to  be  regarded  as 
belonging  to  a  past  by  the  younger  generation  ;  and, 
further,  the  variety  of  his  work  and  his  detachment  from 
factions  and  literary  coteries  do  not  make  for  wide 
popularity  or  ready  recognition  from  an  ordinary  public. 
To  many  his  autobiographies  and  critical  essays  are  but 
examples  of  affectation  and  pose,  his  recantations  of  old 
and  adoption  of  new  forms  of  worship  evidence  of  in- 
stability and  weak-mindedness.  But  consistency  is  the 
virtue  of  petty  minds,  and  the  man  who,  like  Mr.  Moore, 
seeks  for  a  religion  in  which  he  shall  be  priest  and  people 
is  fated  never  to  find  it.  For  beneath  all  his  changes, 
even  in  the  wastes  of  Zolaism,  Mr.  Moore  never  lost  sight 
of  the  fact  that  there  were  in  the  world  Protestantism 
and  Catholicism,  and  as  late  as  the  years  in  which  he 
wrote  Hail  and  Farewell  the  burden  of  choice  between 
the  two  still  lay  heavy  upon  him.  As  he  has  never 
been  able  to  choose  to  himself  a  religion,  so  he  has  never 
been  able  to  choose  to  himself  an  art.  His  methods  in 
fiction,  his  judgments  upon  art  have  changed  continually, 
but  he  has  never  entirely  changed  himself,  for  he  has 
never  wholly  been  converted  to  any  creed  or  artistic 
faith.  His  temper  is  the  temper  of  the  critic  and  inquirer 
who  can  only  wonder  at  the  faiths  by  which  others 
stand.  He  announces  his  opinions  as  authoritatively  as 
Ruskin,  and,  like  Ruskin,  he  is  always  stimulating  when 
most  perverse.  Modern  Painting  (1893),  despite  limita- 
tions of  prejudice  and  insufficient  knowledge,  is  one  of 
the  general  books  on  painting,  written  in  the  last  three 
decades,  best  worth  reading ;  and  the  miscellaneous 
essays  of  Impressions  and  Opinions  (1890)  contain  criticism 
of  literature  which  is  never  derivative,  but  the  direct 
expression  of  an  individual  mind.  It  is  refreshing  to  see 
Balzac  throned  above  Shakespeare,  to  learn  that  Meredith's 
style  has  neither  light  nor  magic,  to  hear  that  Thackeray 
is  a  middle-class  writer,  that  Turgenieff  is  the  most  subtle 
of  all  novelists,  and  that  nobody  ever  wrote  English  as 
beautifully  as  Pater.  But  it  is  in  the  guise  of  the  candid 
friend  that  Mr.  Moore  is  at  his  best,  demonstrating  the 
insignificance  of  literature  written  by  Roman  Catholics, 
gently  reminding  actresses  that  "  the  ideal  mother ' 


CHAP.  H]  NEW-COMERS  293 

cannot  be  the  great  artist,  passing  strictures  upon  the 
"  domestic  "  and  respectable  literature  of  the  latter  part 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  signalised  by  the  advent  of 
clubs  for  men  of  letters,  where  a  solemn  decorum  reigns> 
the  Nineteenth  Century  lies  on  the  table  and  stories  can 
only  be  told  in  a  corner.  This  is  all  entirely  refreshing, 
but  as  a  final  attitude  of  mind  little  more  than  a  tardy 
survival  of  the  period  of  the  young  French  Romantics, 
when  Hugo  was  coming  to  his  own  and  Gautier  wore 
flaming  red  waistcoats.  The  stolid  and  the  respectable 
have  written  well  in  their  day  ;  even  Mr.  Moore  has  a 
kind  word  for  Wordsworth.  He  can  more  safely  be 
followed  wrhen  he  praises  than  when  he  blames.  His 
estimates  are  too  personal,  and  he  admits  that  his  dis- 
likes are  a  matter  of  temperamental  prejudice  he  cannot 
overcome.  We  lose  faith  in  the  critic  who  sees  little  but 
good  reporting  in  Mr.  Hardy,  and  fails  to  recognise  in 
him  a  range  and  comprehension,  a  poetical  vision,  which 
is  certainly  more  profound  and  significant  than  that  of 
Balzac.  It  is  well  Mr.  Moore  has  the  grace  to  disclaim 
all  knowledge  of  criticism  as  a  science.  Yet  he  is  not 
wholly  without  principles.  Of  the  novel  worthy  of  the 
name  he  demands  that  it  shall  be  realistic,  that  it  shall 
concern  itself  with  character  rather  than  with  incident, 
that  its  narrative  shall  be  presented  rhythmically.  If 
realism  has  not  always  been  his  aim  the  second  and  third 
principles  have  never  been  lost  to  sight.  Mr.  Moore  is 
French  in  his  love  of  lucidity  and  logic,  but  he  is  not 
by  instinct  an  unshirking  realist  of  the  French  school, 
though  he  educated  himself  upon  French  models  in  his 
youth,  and  so  successfully  that  in  A  Mummer  s  Wife 
and  Esther  Waters  he  produced  novels  of  definite  import- 
ance not  only  as  manifestoes  but  as  influences  upon  the 
work  of  younger  men.  In  Evelyn  Innes  and  Sister  Teresa 
he  turned  to  a  different  aim — slowly  evolved  study  of 
character  in  a  setting  of  ethical  and  religious  argument 
worked  in  the  author's  peculiar  vein  :  and  latterly,  in  a 
more  subdued  manner,  he  has  written  poetic  fiction  in 
The  Lake  and  personal  confession  in  the  spirit  of  romantic 
disillusion  in  Hail  and  Farewell.  Different  as  have  been 
the  aims  by  which  Mr.  Moore  has  been  actuated  it  would 
not  be  difficult,  even  without  the  help  of  title-pages,  to 


294  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

recognise  his  publications  for  the  work  of  one  hand.  His 
mind  is  receptive  and  plastic,  but  he  shapes  his  new 
methods  and  enthusiasms  by  a  single  mould,  as  statuettes 
of  identical  form  may  be  cast  in  different  metals.  And 
though  for  many  years  Mr.  Moore  has  not  been  a  popular 
or  an  influential  author,  his  later  work  is  in  true  literary 
quality  on  a  higher  plane  than  the  early  realistic  novels 
which  first  won  him  a  reputation,  distinctive  as  they  were 
and  beyond  the  range  of  other  men.  If  gifts  of  crafts- 
manship, style  and  lucidity,  and  the  possession  of  ideas 
can  in  themselves  serve  to  redeem  a  name  from  the 
danger  of  falling  into  oblivion,  Mr.  Moore  is  not  likely 
soon  to  be  forgotten.  In  the  years  of  drought  following 
the  decline  of  the  great  Victorian  novel  Mr.  Moore  appeared 
not  only  as  a  forerunner  of  the  newer  fiction,  with  which 
we  are  more  directly  concerned  in  this  volume,  but  as 
a  novelist  who  endures  well  the  scrutiny  of  comparison 
with  any  who  have  begun  to  write  since  his  youth. 

George  Gissing,  a  few  years  younger  than  Mr.  Moore, 
was  another  sign  of  the  times,  a  severe  realist,  not  in 
consequence    of    a    theory    of    literary 
George  Robert         methods   adopted   from    others,    but   in 
Gissing,  his  own  right  and  as  a  result  of  unhappy 

1857-1903.  experience.     He  has  been  described  as 

the  "  historian  of  the  middle  classes," 
and,  if  this  leaves  something  to  be  added,  it  gives  the  chief 
content  and  character  of  his  work.  Yet  Gissing  was  him- 
self unsympathetic  toward  the  lower  middle  classes,  and 
especially  toward  those  into  whose  domestic  lives  poverty 
with  all  its  sordid  followers  intruded.  In  Born  in 
Exile  he  describes  his  hero  watching  the  carriages  of  the 
wealthy  and  fortunate  drive  in  and  out  of  the  park, 
noting  the  manner  of  leisured  ease  in  the  occupants  of 
the  carriages  and  the  obsequious  attention  of  the  crowd, 
feeling  that  by  temperament  and  education  his  place 
was  with  these  and  not  with  the  shabby  throngs  of  the 
pavement.  In  the  musings  of  his  hero  George  Gissing 
revealed  his  own  mind.  His  attitude  is  always  that  of  a 
man  wronged.  The  lot  should  have  fallen  to  him  in 
pleasant  places,  in  a  dignified  old-world  house  with  a 
quiet  garden,  a  roomy  library  stocked  with  carefully 
chosen  books,  and  a  sufficient  income  to  free  him  from 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  295 

the  cares  of  earning  a  livelihood,  in  order  that  he  might 
spend  his  hours  in  leisurely  study  and  the  bettering  of  his 
own  powers.  Instead  of  this,  alternations  of  garret  and 
cellar  were  his  dwelling,  the  common  parks  of  London 
his  garden,  the  reading-room  of  the  British  Museum  his 
library,  and  for  many  years,  according  to  himself,  he 
knew  no  place  to  wash  in  save  the  unattractive  lavatory 
of  the  museum. 

Gissing's  lot  was  hard  ;  but  it  may  be  that  uncon- 
sciously he  magnified  his  sufferings.  From  the  age  of 
twenty-five  onward  he  seems  always  to  have  been  able 
to  earn  a  small  livelihood.  Temperamentally  he  was 
debarred  from  contentment  and  happiness  ;  but  it  was 
possible  for  him  to  live  and  eat  during  the  greater  part 
of  his  working  years,  though  his  surroundings  may  have 
been  drab  and  dreary.  To  the  end  he  bore  a  grudge 
against  life  :  he  was  the  student  and  solitary  condemned 
to  manufacture  fiction  for  money.  He  was  not  unfriendly, 
but  shyness,  absence  of  tact,  and  an  inability  to  stoop 
to  the  common  ways  of  preferment  hampered  him.  To 
this  it  may  be  added  that  he  married  twice  and  dis- 
asterously  to  his  happiness  on  each  occasion.  The  wonder 
cannot  be  great,  therefore,  that  Gissing  walked  through 
life  a  man  embittered.  In  his  later  years  his  income  was 
better,  and  in  Veranilda  (1904)  he  turned  from  writing 
realistic  novels  of  contemporary  middle-class  life  to  a 
romance  of  Rome  in  the  time  of  Belisarius,  and  in  Will 
Warburton  (1905),  his  last  complete  novel,  although  he 
returns  to  mean  streets,  the  tone  is  kindlier  and  more 
gentle.  Neither  of  these,  however,  can  be  accounted 
typical  of  his  work,  and  the  latter  was  written  in  an  easy 
mood  as  a  money-making  book.  In  good  and  comfort- 
able circumstances  Gissing  would  have  been  another  man  : 
his  nature  was  friendly  and  sympathetic,  but  years  of 
struggle  with  poverty  and  ill-success  hardened  him  into  a 
mood  of  revolt  against  the  kind  of  life  he  knew  well  and 
hated  intensely.  We  must  take  Gissing  as  the  social  world 
and  his  own  mistakes  of  judgment  made  him — a  man 
labouring  under  a  sense  of  the  injustice  of  circumstance. 

His  boyhood  and  youth  might  well  have  been  spent 
under  conditions  less  promising.  His  father,  resident  at 
Wakefield,  where  Gissing  was  born,  was  a  man  of  intel- 


296  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

lectual  attainments.  George  Gissing  received  a  good 
education,  and  soon  gave  evidence  of  literary  ability. 
At  Owen's  College,  Manchester,  he  won  a  Shakespeare 
scholarship,  an  English  poem  prize  and  a  prize  for 
classics.  Unfortunately  his  career  at  Owen's  College  broke 
down,  and  he  disappeared  to  live  for  some  years 
almost  as  an  outcast.  He  was  a  clerk  in  Liverpool,  then 
crossed  to  America  to  earn  his  living  indifferently  as  a 
classical  tutor  and  a  gas-fitter.  In  1877  he  returned  to 
Europe  and  was  able  to  spend  a  period  of  quiet  study  at 
Jena.  In  1878  he  was  in  England  and  published  at  his 
own  expense  a  novel,  Workers  in  the  Dawn,  which  proved 
a  financial  failure  and  effected  nothing  save  the  impoverish- 
ment of  the  author,  who  was  flung  back  upon  tutorage 
and  journalism. 

With  The  Unclassed  (1884)  and  Demos  (1886)  Gissing 
first  showed  his  power,  though  these  are  wanting  in  his 
more  mature  skill.  The  former  is  a  story  of  two  girls 
who  rescue  themselves  from  the  pavement  to  live  clean 
and  womanly  lives,  the  latter  a  study  of  Socialism  and 
its  influence  upon  the  working  classes.  Demos  displays 
qualities  and  characteristics  which  marked  Gissing' s  work 
throughout — thoroughness,  patience,  the  closest  observa- 
tion. Many  pages  show  him  the  true  artist,  not  merely 
the  classical  scholar  gone  astray,  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
there  are  many  pages  of  dull  narrative,  when  he  writes 
without  inspiration  and  evidently  without  pleasure.  After 
reading  only  a  few  pages  of  Gissing  nobody  could  mistake 
him  for  the  writer  of  commercial  fiction  ;  but  there  are 
large  tracts  in  every  book  which  leave  us  unexhilarated 
and  wearied.  The  result  of  these  drab  spaces  is,  perhaps, 
to  impress  upon  us  more  strongly  pictures  of  those  sordid 
purlieus  of  life  Gissing  commonly  paints.  But  this  was 
not  the  intention  of  his  duller  passages  ;  they  represent 
failure  to  write,  not  purposive  realism. 

These  two  early  novels  set  the  tone  and  pitch  of  Gissing' s 
writing  for  many  years.  Thyrza  (1887)  is  the  story  of  a 
factory  girl,  endowed  with  finer  thought  and  feeling  than 
her  fellows,  beset  with  the  gross  squalor  and  misery  of 
life  in  South  London.  The  Nether  World  (1889)  is  a 
realistic  picture  of  misery,  vice  and  heartrending  struggle 
for  bread  among  the  sunken  multitudes  of  Clerkenwell. 


CHAP,  ii]  NEW-COMERS  297 

And  in  this  struggle  we  see  that  the  battle  is  not  to  the 
idealist  nor  the  race  to  the  eager  and  hopeful,  but  to 
circumstances  which  overpower  all  alike.  It  was  not, 
however,  till  he  wrote  New  Grub  Street  (1891)  that  Gissing 
met  with  any  recognition  of  the  quality  and  power  of 
his  work.  Yet  it  is  by  no  means  one  of  his  best  books. 
Its  direct  appeal  in  subject  matter  to  the  ordinary  critic 
and  man  of  letters  probably  accounted  in  a  degree  for 
the  greater  measure  of  notice  the  book  received.  New 
Grub  Street  is  not  autobiographical :  but  the  story  of  the 
conscientious  and  responsible  artist  who  fails  of  success, 
while  the  writer  of  commonplace  fiction  prospers,  is  a 
theme  upon  which  Gissing  could  write  with  feeling  and 
intensity.  Denzil  Quarrier  (1892)  removes  the  scene  to  a 
life  of  easier  circumstances  ;  and  in  Lilian  we  find  one 
of  the  most  attractive  of  Gissing' s  feminine  charac- 
terisations. The  book  is  an  attack  upon  the  immorality 
of  those  marriage  laws  which  bind  a  woman  to  a  common 
criminal  who  has  grossly  deceived  her.  Lilian  chooses  to 
live  with  another  man  whom  she  can  love,  but  the  force 
of  public  opinion  is  too  strong  for  her  and  her  story  ends 
in  suicide.  Apart  from  the  character  of  Lilian  Denzil 
Quarrier  is  not  a  very  successful  book  ;  nor  free  in  passages 
from  a  failing  we  can  rarely  attribute  to  Gissing — exaggera- 
tion and  melodrama.  To  the  same  year  belongs  Born  in 
Exile  (1892),  a  longer,  more  ambitious  and  far  more 
striking  book.  Here  again  is  a  hint  of  autobiography 
in  the  struggle  between  religious  belief  and  doubt  in  the 
mind  of  the  hero,  who  is  a  strange  mixture  of  strong 
idealism  and  base  hypocrisy.  Ambitious  to  rise  in  the 
world  and  meet  with  cultivated  society  he  fights  to  per- 
suade himself  into  a  belief  in  the  Christian  Creeds,  that 
he  may  take  clerical  orders  and  receive  the  hall-mark  of 
respectability.  The  attempt  collapses,  both  on  account 
of  its  inherent  falsity  and  the  crooked  perversion  of  the 
hero's  character.  Gissing  never  surpassed  this  remark- 
able study  of  the  complicated  character  of  Godwin  Peak, 
idealist  and  materialist,  who  continually  excites  our  con- 
tempt with  his  double-dealing  and  persevering  efforts  to 
lure  himself  into  a  wholly  false  state  of  mind  and  yet 
never  wholly  alienates  our  sympathy.  Never  in  fiction 
has  a  finer  picture  been  drawn  of  the  man  whose  environ- 


298  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

ment  irks  him,  till  he  is  driven  into  retreat,  exhausted 
and  wearied  by  a  guerilla  warfare  with  sleepless  circum- 
stance. The  Odd  Women  (1893)  is  not  so  strong  or  com- 
plex a  book,  but  it  is  not  less  pitilessly  realistic.  It  paints 
the  lot  of  superfluous  and  indigent  gentlewomen,  and  the 
unhappy  fate  of  a  girl  who  marries  for  the  sake  of  a 
home. 

At  this  stage,  although  there  is  good  characterisation 
and  strong  writing  in  passages,  Gissing  showed  signs  of 
having  overworked  the  seam  of  his  experience  and  observa- 
tion. In  In  the  Year  of  Jubilee  (1894),  a  satire  on  middle- 
class  vulgarity,  and  The  Town  Traveller  (1898)  he  attempts 
to  extract  ore  from  worn-out  workings.  And  this  is  also 
true  of  The  Whirlpool  (1897),  which  has  for  its  motive 
the  fatal  spell  of  the  pleasures  and  excitements  of  London. 

In  these  later  years  Gissing  did  better  and  certainly 
more  attractive  work  outside  the  field  of  fiction.  His 
Charles  Dickens  (1898)  is  the  best  book  ever  written  on 
another  and  very  different  historian  of  the  London  streets. 
It  shows  how  thoroughly  and  sympathetically  he  had 
read  his  Dickens,  how  in  a  measure  he  derived  inspiration 
from  him.  Yet  he  could  not,  like  Dickens,  recognise 
gladly  the  humour  as  well  as  the  misery  of  the  under- 
world. Dickens  was  as  earnest  as  Gissing,  he  sympathised 
no  less  with  the  helpless  and  unhappy,  but  he  did  not, 
like  Gissing,  doubt  the  integrity  of  the  universe,  and  he 
could,  therefore,  be  joyous  where  Gissing  was  moved  only 
to  despairing  wrath.  By  the  Ionian  Sea  (1901),  the  fruit 
of  a  holiday,  reflects  a  side  of  Gissing' s  nature  starved 
in  the  years  of  poverty  and  struggle — the  instincts  of  a 
gentle  and  scholarly  mind.  But  the  best  of  his  later 
writings  is  the  delightful  and  personal  Private  Papers  of 
Henry  Ryecroft  (1903),  a  happy  mingling  of  autobiography 
and  fiction,  reflecting  the  musings  of  a  recluse.  In  this 
book  Gissing  raises  the  veil  and  shows  the  intensity  of  the 
mental  suffering  through  which  he  passed  in  the  dark 
years,  when  it  was  only  with  difficulty  he  preserved 
unspoiled  those  things  which  are  "  quiet,  wise  and  good." 

The  world  at  large  prefers  happy  people,  and  rightly, 
for,  as  Stevenson  inadequately  remarked,  a  happy  man 
or  woman  is  a  better  thing  to  find  than  a  five-pound  note. 
Unhappy  men  have  rarely  won  great  honour  in  their 


CHAP.  H]  NEW-COMERS  299 

generation,  and  Gissing  was  not  only  unhappy — he  made 
no  attempt  to  hide  the  fact.  Failing  happiness  other  sure 
roads  to  success  are  to  be  sentimental  or  amusing ;  and 
Gissing  was  neither,  he  was  harshly  in  earnest  and  he 
could  not  stoop  merely  to  entertain.  Perhaps  he  came 
within  the  range  of  Samuel  Butler's  half-humorous 
contempt  for  the  last  enemy  to  be  destroyed — serious- 
mindedness.  In  personal  intercourse  he  could  be  genial, 
but  he  never  overcame  the  intellectual  complacency 
against  which  his  schoolfellows  chafed.  Meredith's  "  good 
wind  of  laughter  "  would  have  cleared  his  heart  and  brain. 
But  he  could  not  laugh  freely  and  easily  ;  and  a  steady 
reading  of  his  novels  is  to  be  overweighted  and  oppressed 
as  on  a  dark  and  windless  day.  It  is  unnatural  to  feel  no 
breath  of  air  in  the  open,  to  see  no  movement  of  the 
clouds  ;  and  the  tense  unhappiness  of  Gissing' s  novels  is 
as  unnatural.  The  utmost  depths  of  wretchedness  cannot 
be  without  moments  of  forgetfulness. 

Not  only  is  the  setting  of  Gissing' s  tales  grey  and  sordid, 
the  style  falls  into  a  harmony  with  the  matter  ;  it  is  a 
style  that  may  be  described  as  good  standard  English 
without  special  individuality  or  charm.  This  statement 
applies  strictly  only  to  the  novels  and  short  stories  :  in 
The  Private  Papers  of  Henry  Ryecroft,  with  the  change  of 
atmosphere,  the  style  takes  upon  itself  more  light  and 
colour.  The  greatness  of  Gissing' s  work  lies  in  its  strength, 
independence  and  thoroughness.  If  he  has  little  humour 
and  few  graces,  he  is  equally  without  petty  faults  and 
weaknesses.  He  is  above  the  suspicion  of  exaggerating 
and  making  dark  mainly  for  the  sake  of  effect.  What  he 
sees  he  transcribes  patiently  and  slowly,  sometimes  with 
a  laboriousness  that  is  unnecessary  and  tiresome,  but 
he  never  descends  to  sentiment,  or  attempts  an  appearance 
of  strength  by  violent  methods. 

Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  is  a  younger  man  than  either  of 
the  two  novelists  just  named,  but  he  began  to  publish 
fiction  almost  as  early,  and  by  the 
Eudyard  Kipling,  year  1890  he  enjoyed  an  extraordinary 
b.  1865.  fame.  He  is  also  to  be  placed  here  by- 

right  of  his  far-ranging  influence  upon 
the  development  of  the  English  short  story  and  novel. 
Whether  Mr.  Kipling  is  a  great  writer  is  a  question  that 


300  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

may  fairly  be  asked,  but  that  his  early  tales  represent 
a  marked  and  new  evolvement  of  the  short  story  cannot 
be  denied.  Literature  constantly  tends  to  stereotype 
itself  by  formal  methods,  and  as  constantly  attempts  are 
made  to  naturalise  literature  to  the  standard  of  common 
life.  Mr.  Kipling's  short  story  was  primarily  a  col- 
loquialisation  of  fiction  for  the  sake  of  mess-rooms, 
railway  carriages  and  other  places  where  literature  as 
an  art  is  not  greatly  in  request.  Plain  Tales  from  the 
Hills  first  appeared  as  short  stories  in  the  corner  of  a 
newspaper  ;  and  the  stories  immediately  succeeding  these 
were  published  in  the  paper  covers  of  a  railway  library. 
The  aim  of  these  tales  was  to  entertain,  but  the  younger 
Mr.  Kipling  was  a  realist  of  the  notebook  order,  who 
rendered  to  the  life  the  snipped  and  slangy  dialogue, 
the  morals  and  the  manners  of  Anglo-Indians.  The 
young  sub-editor  showed  no  marked  inventive  power  in 
his  newspaper  stories  ;  but  the  method  was  fresh,  the 
note  that  of  a  writer  who  was  strung  to  harmony  with 
the  activities,  vain  and  useful,  of  men  and  women  in 
the  world,  the  irony  of  his  humour  was  excellent,  he 
possessed  an  admirable  knack  for  journalistic  catch- 
phrasing  ;  and,  further,  he  adopted  the  old  trick,  first 
largely  practised  by  Defoe,  of  taking  the  reader  into  his 
confidence,  and  thus  cajoling  him  into  a  belief  in  the 
reality  of  narrative  and  people.  "  Mrs.  Hauksbee,"  one 
tale  opens,  "  was  sometimes  nice  to  her  own  sex.  Here 
is  a  story  to  prove  this  ;  and  you  can  believe  just  as  much 
as  ever  you  please."  However  jaded  the  reader  his  atten- 
tion is  roused  to  wakefulness  by  such  a  beginning.  The 
author,  again,  frequently  remarks  en  passant  upon  another 
story  of  the  same  kind  which  he  is  reminded  of  by  an 
incident  related,  and  this  lends  an  atmosphere  of  veri- 
similitude to  the  narrative  in  hand.  The  same  end  is 
served  by  the  repeated  appearance  of  Strickland  and  the 
famous  Mrs.  Hauksbee. 

Plain  Talcs  from  the  Hills,  first  collected  in  1887, 
touches  many  sides  of  Indian  life — native,  official,  military, 
social.  The  tales  are  written  in  easy  and  conversational 
manner,  flow  lightly  without  reflection  on  higher  themes 
of  philosophy  and  metaphysics,  which  is  no  more  than 
"  playing  bricks  with  words  "  to  Mr.  Kipling  and  his 


CHAP.  IT]  NEW-COMERS  301 

gallery  of  characters.  But  the  pathos  of  many  o  these 
stories  is  better  than  the  humour,  and  that  is  high  praise. 
The  story  of  Lispeth,  the  hill-girl,  pining  for  the  English 
lover  who  never  intended  to  remember  her,  of  the  subaltern 
boy  who  commits  suicide  because  he  is  too  sensitive  to 
endure  the  tolerant  code  of  Anglo-Indian  morals  ('  Thrown 
Away  '),  of  the  half-caste's  slavery  to  opium  ('  The  Gate 
of  the  Hundred  Sorrows  ') — in  these  and  others  the  irony 
and  the  pathos  of  circumstance  are  delineated  clearly, 
simply  and  without  unavailing  sentimentality.  On  the 
other  hand  the  stream  of  humour  in  ironic  vein  never  fails, 
nor  that  mark  of  literary  calling,  the  gift  of  phrase- 
making.  If  there  is  little,  save  in  a  few  of  these  tales,  to 
mark  any  consciousness  of  the  beauty  of  the  physical 
universe,  the  light  and  splendour  of  the  Orient,  it  is  not, 
as  Mr.  Kipling  has  since  abundantly  shown,  because  the 
author  cares  for  none  of  these  things,  but  because  the 
character  and  setting  of  the  narrative  exclude  them. 

Soldiers  Three  (1888)  was  the  first  of  six  collections  of 
short  tales  (1888-9)  in  Wheeler's  Railway  Library.  In 
these  and  in  other  military  tales  Mr.  Kipling  introduces 
Private  Mulvaney  with  his  two  friends,  Ortheris  and 
Learoyd.  A  prodigality  of  praise  has  been  lavished  upon 
the  author's  pictures  of  Tommy  Atkins  and  his  life  ;  but 
the  Mulvaney  tales,  on  a  dispassionate  reading,  convey 
little  but  a  sense  of  strain  and  tedious  artifice.  The 
exaggerated  and  impossible  situations,  the  difficult  joking 
of  '  Krishna  Mulvaney  '  and  other  of  these  tales  is  weari- 
some, the  impossible  brogue  of  Mulvaney  exasperat- 
ing. Dialect  has  its  place,  but  its  representation  in  print 
must  always  be  an  artifice,  and  the  less  that  artifice  is 
laboured  the  better.  The  best  of  the  Mulvaney  stories, 
'  My  Lord  the  Elephant,'  belongs  to  a  later  collection 
(Many  Inventions]  ;  but,  for  the  most  part,  beer,  uncouth 
thoughts,  laboured  dialect,  impossible  and  ridiculous 
adventures  are  the  substance  of  these  stories,  and  their 
merit  is  beneath  the  standard  of  Mr.  Kipling's  early 
writing.  In  Black  and  White,  of  the  same  series,  treats 
chiefly  of  native  life.  Slang,  dialect,  meretricious  attempts 
at  realism  disappear,  and  the  tales  skilfully  depict  the 
colour,  dust,  smell  and  thought  of  an  Oriental  world 
foreign  to  the  Western  mind.  But  the  early  volumes 


802  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

which  have  retained  their  popularity  with  the  ordinary 
reader  are  Under  the  Deodars,  The  Phantom  'Rickshaw 
and  Wee  Willie  Winkie,  and  that  because  the  contents 
of  these  slight  volumes  are  the  work  of  the  born  story- 
teller. A  knack  of  phrase,  of  writing  dialogue  in  quick 
interplay  of  colloquialisms,  of  packing  much  incident  and 
emotion  into  a  small  space,  united  to  raise  Mr.  Kipling 
to  the  position  of  phenomenal  popularity  he,  at  one  time, 
enjoyed.  With  the  uncritical  matter  is  of  no  account 
and  style  a  vain  thing  ;  the  public  performer  who  rehearses 
his  tricks  vivaciously,  exciting  the  surprise  rather  than 
the  admiration  of  the  spectators,  can  count  upon  making 
his  bow  to  a  storm  of  plaudits.  The  majority  of  those  who 
read  novels  or  go  to  the  playhouse  wish  only  to  forget 
for  an  hour  the  world  that  is  too  much  with  them,  and 
they  are  grateful  to  the  acrobat  who  carries  them  out  of 
themselves  without  exacting  the  pain  of  intellectual  effort 
or  fixed  attention.  And  this  Mr.  Kipling  exactly  achieved 
with  his  vivacity  and  ad  hominem  appeals.  When,  in 
later  life,  he  assumed  the  role  of  Imperialistic  prophet, 
a  task  for  which  the  Hebraic  obtuseness  of  his  ethic  fitted 
him,  his  popularity  waned  and  half  the  seats  in  the 
auditorium  emptied. 

Raciness,  vigour,  and  a  journalistic  knack  rather  than 
a  literary  gift,  give  realism  to  the  tales  in  the  collections 
last-named.  Under  the  Deodars  chiefly  contains  sketches 
of  Anglo-Indian  life  at  Simla  or  elsewhere,  tales  which 
titillate  the  taste  for  scarcely  innocent  flirtations  and  jaded 
intrigues  in  a  society  where  morals  are  easy  and  the  Deity 
who  made  the  ten  commandments  is  recognised  by  all, 
but,  like  the  tax-collector,  forgotten  in  the  intervals 
between  his  visits.  The  story  which  gives  its  title  to 
The  Phantom  'Rickshaw  might  have  been  one  of  the  best 
of  ghost-stories.  The  piercing  refrain  of  the  spectre- 
woman's  cry  to  the  man  who  has  injured  her,  "  Please 
forgive  me  :  it's  all  a  mistake,  a  hideous  mistake  !  "  is 
repeated  with  quite  extraordinary  effect ;  and  the  trick 
has  been  imitated  by  later  writers  of  ghost-stories,  Mr. 
E.  F.  Benson  among  them.  Unfortunately  the  story  is 
ruined,  as  Mr.  J.  M.  Robertson  has  pointed  out,  by  a 
misrepresentation  of  the  obvious  and  natural  attitude  of 
the  hero's  betrothed.  She  would  have  pitied  his  mental 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  303 

derangement  instead  of  flaming  into  anger  with  him. 
And  it  is  not  infrequently  that  Mr.  Kipling  fails  in  this 
way,  for  he  is  occupied  chiefly  with  story -telling,  not  the 
analysis  of  character,  and  his  people  react  to  circumstance 
in  an  impossible  manner.  Thus  in  '  The  Strange  Ride  ' 
the  unbelievable  stupidity  of  Gunga  Dass,  if  he  be  a 
sophisticated  Brahmin,  puts  the  finishing  touch  to  the 
grotesque  incredibility  of  a  macabre  tale.  And  the  child- 
stories  of  Wee  Willie  Winkle  have  only  to  be  read  by  the 
side  of  Mr.  Kenneth  Grahame's  Golden  Age  to  expose  the 
impossibly  grown-up  thought  of  the  children.  From  this 
indictment  the  two  drummer  boys  of  the  stirring  sketch 
'  Drums  of  the  Fore  and  Aft '  must  be  excepted.  In 
none  of  these  early  stories  does  a  character,  except  perhaps 
Mrs.  Hauksbee,  the  managing  dame  of  Anglo-Indian 
drawing-rooms,  emerge  with  that  degree  of  convincing 
reality  which  prints  itself  on  the  imagination.  It  would 
be  unfair  to  ask  of  Mr.  Kipling  that  he  should  think  in 
these  early  tales  ;  the  matter  is  too  slight,  and  he  makes 
none  of  the  pretences  of  his  later  volumes ;  but  character- 
drawing  we  have  a  right  to  expect,  and  we  do  not  find 
it  even  within  the  range  compassed  by  many  a  second- 
rate  novelist.  High  spirits,  vivid  phrasing,  an  instinct 
for  dramatic  situation,  humour,  a  gift  of  swift  and  vigorous 
story-telling,  all  these  we  may  allow  to  Mr.  Kipling.  And 
with  so  much  in  hand  he  almost  succeeds  in  hiding  the 
inadequacy  of  his  characterisation  ;  yet  we  remember 
his  people,  if  at  all,  by  tags  extracted  from  notebooks 
and  used  as  labels — they  are  manufactured.  The  artifices 
by  which  he  depicts  the  British  soldier  in  India  have 
already  been  noted :  his  partial  failure  in  the  stories  of 
Anglo-Indian  society  is  less  remarkable,  because  his  types 
merely  dally  with  the  passing  hour.  The  child-stories 
have  charm  ;  but  the  children  are  grown-up,  save  for 
grammar  and  pronunciation.  The  tales  of  native  life  are 
a  different  matter,  and  more  difficult  to  judge  ;  but  the 
metaphysical  bent  of  the  Oriental  mind  is  certainly  missed 
by  the  crude  matter-of-factness  of  the  Anglo-Saxon.  Yet, 
despite  faults  in  style  and  form  and  thinness  of  char- 
acter-drawing, we  are  compelled  to  accept  Stevenson's 
admission  that  "  there  is  a  tide  of  life  "  in  all  these 
stories. 


304  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Between  the  years  1890  and  1897  we  come  upon  a 
second  period  in  Mr.  Kipling's  literary  activity.  He  had 
now  become  famous,  had  married  and  settled  with  his 
wife  in  America  for  several  years.  In  1891  he  wrote  his 
first  long  story,  The  Light  that  Failed,  which  appeared  in 
Lippincott's  Magazine.  In  the  original  form  of  the  tale, 
as  it  appeared  in  the  pages  of  this  magazine,  we  meet 
with  the  hero,  Dick  Heldar,  artist  and  war-correspondent, 
on  his  return  to  England  after  ten  years  of  wandering 
life.  Maisie,  the  woman  who  loved  him  in  early  days, 
appears  from  the  past  and  nurses  him  through  an  illness 
which  ends  in  his  blindness  and  their  marriage.  In  the 
new  and  enlarged  form  of  the  tale  Heldar  dies,  unmarried 
and  blind,  at  the  seat  of  war  in  the  Soudan.  More  than 
to  any  of  Mr.  Kipling's  books  to  this  has  fallen  noisy 
panegyric  and  angry  denunciation.  It  illustrates  forcibly 
his  conception  of  men  and  women.  Maisie  fails  to  suggest 
more  than  a  flutter  of  moods  in  which  traces  of  personality 
are  lost ;  and  Heldar  and  his  artist  friend  talk  after  the 
fashion  of  men  who  were  once  in  touch  with  the  courtesies 
of  life  but  have  chosen  to  forget  them,  and  evidently 
with  willingness.  The  hero  is  an  exact  and  life-like  portrait 
of  the  underbred  and  overbearing  young  Englishman.  The 
words  which  spring  to  his  lips  when  taken  off  his  guard 
aptly  reveal  his  character.  If  he  collides  with  a  passenger 
in  the  street  Ife  recoils  with  an  oath  ;  if  he  is  accidentally 
pushed  into  the  gutter  he  mutters,  "  All  right.  That's 
another  nick  in  the  score.  I'll  jostle  you  later  on  "  ; 
when  the  smoke  of  the  machine-gun  blows  back  in  his 
nostrils  and  howls  of  the  wounded  rend  the  darkness, 
"  wild  with  delight  at  the  sounds  and  the  smells,"  he 
shouts  aloud,  "  God  is  very  good — I  never  thought  I'd 
hear  this  again.  Give  'em  hell,  men.  Oh,  give  'em  hell  !  " 
The  story,  the  atmosphere,  the  dialogue  of  The  Light 
that  Failed,  even  when  the  dialogue  turns  on  art  and 
painting,  alternate  between  the  extremes  of  the  uncouth 
and  violent.  Mr.  Kipling  is  never  coarse  as  Gorky  is 
coarse,  nor  is  he  suggestive  like  De  Maupassant ;  but 
like  Ibsen  he  can  be  vulgar.  The  author  fails  to  recognise 
of  what  sort  are  his  characters  in  The  Light  that  Failed, 
evidently  holding  them  to  be  typical  of  the  vigorous  and 
fine  instincts  of  the  British  race.  Characterisation  is  con- 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  305 

fused,  and,  further,  though  in  form  a  novel,  The  Light 
that  Failed  is  in  effect  only  a  short  story  elongated. 

In  the  years  named  Mr.  Kipling  further  published  The 
Naulhaka  (1892),  written  in  collaboration  with  Mr.  Wolcott 
Balestier,  and  volumes  of  short  stories  not  exclusively 
Indian  in  their  setting,  including  Life's  Handicap  (1890) 
and  Many  Inventions  (1893).  These  tales  are  as  energetic, 
but  they  are  not  so  vivacious  as  the  earlier  stories  :  the 
sentences  are  longer,  the  paragraphs  show  more  con- 
struction and  betray  the  fact  that  Mr.  Kipling  is  not  so 
young  as  he  once  was  and  is  trying  to  live  up  to  a  tradi- 
tion. Captains  Courageous  (1897)  is  more  a  sketch  than 
a  story  of  fishermen  on  the  Grand  Banks,  and  illustrates 
the  author's  faculty  for  representing  any  aspect  of  life 
with  a  wonderful  air  of  realism.  But  with  all  the  care 
he  has  given  to  this  book  he  has  scarcely  succeeded  in 
distinguishing  the  characters  from  one  another.  They 
are  worked  up  from  material  stored  in  the  notebooks. 
By  far  the  finest  and  most  original  work  of  Mr.  Kipling 
in  this  period  is  to  be  found  in  the  two  Jungle  Books 
(1894-5).  These,  with  Kim,  which  may  be  counted  as 
falling  into  another  period,  are  the  high-water  of  his 
attainment.  In  the  Jungle  Books  wolves,  tigers,  panthers, 
monkeys  and  snakes  speak,  we  are  introduced  to  the 
customs  and  laws  of  the  jungle,  and  hear  the  story  of 
Mowgli,  the  man-cub,  a  foundling  of  the  wolves  who 
grows  up  with  the  pack  till  he  returns  to  the  village, 
and  at  length  comes  back  to  the  jungle  to  avenge  him- 
self on  Shere  Khan,  the  tiger,  his  enemy.  Mr.  Kipling 
has  never  written  better  prose  and  better  dialogue  than 
in  these  stories  ;  and  the  charm  of  simplicity  and  natural- 
ness pervades  them  all. 

Kim  (1901)  is  Mr.  Kipling's  one  true  novel,  and  after 
the  Jungle  Books  his  most  successful  piece  of  writing, 
although  his  instincts  seem  naturally  to  turn  to  the  short 
story.  In  Kim  he  paints  a  collective  picture  of  the  whole 
of  modern  India,  its  life  both  native  and  European,  its 
religion,  its  politics,  its  esoteric  cults,  its  mystery,  its 
burning  heat,  and  all  the  richness  of  that  strange  and 
cosmopolitan  land.  The  decline  in  Mr.  Kipling's  originality 
and  vigour  was  already  a  subject  of  regret  when  he 
appeared  with  his  most  ambitious  and  most  powerful. 


306  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

book.  The  figures  of  Kim,  the  little  English  lad,  left  to 
grow  up  among  low-caste  Hindoos,  of  the  old  and  yellow- 
skinned  Tibetan  lama,  of  Hurree  Babu,  of  Mahmet  Ali, 
the  horse  dealer,  of  English  soldiers  and  officers,  the 
pictures  of  crowded  and  busy  life  in  Lahore,  Benares 
and  on  the  Grand  Trunk  Road  are  drawn  with  a  vivid- 
ness, swiftness  and  unified  interest  which  the  author  has 
not  rivalled  elsewhere.  Kim  is  the  one  book  (apart  from 
the  jungle  tales)  scarcely  injured  by  the  journalistic 
manner,  the  one  book  written  in  the  large  manner  and 
not  in  the  spirit  of  the  short  story.  No  other  single  book 
in  English  may  be  compared  with  Kim  in  its  wide  and 
comprehensive  representation  of  the  mystery,  colour  and 
crowded  life  of  the  East.  It  has  been  charged  against 
its  theme  as  a  whole,  that  whereas  in  the  earlier  part  of 
the  book  the  author  makes  no  question  of  Kim's  ethical 
relationship  to  the  secret  service,  in  the  latter  part  he 
cannot  help  showing  his  abhorrence  of  his  hero's  position, 
with  the  result  that  Kim  is  stranded  without  significance 
in  the  development  of  the  story.  The  criticism  is  rather 
ingenious  than  valuable,  save  in  so  far  as  it  illustrates 
again  Mr.  Kipling's  failure  to  maintain  stability  in  his 
characterisations.  After  a  good  beginning  Kim  degenerates 
into  the  infallible  young  hero  of  the  boy's  book  of  adven- 
ture. 

In  the  later  years  Mr.  Kipling  showed  no  sign  of  weari- 
ness in  the  production  of  the  short  story.  Stalky  and  Co. 
(1899),  a  school  romance,  virtually  falls  into  this  category, 
for  it  is  little  more  than  a  series  of  sketches.  Among  the 
volumes  of  collected  tales  are  The  Day's  Work  (1898), 
Traffics  and  Discoveries  (1904),  Actions  and  Reactions 
(1909),  the  delightful  animal  tales  for  children,  Just-so 
Stories  (1902),  and  Puck  of  Pook's  Hill  (1906),  a  charming 
medley  of  fairy  and  historical  lore  for  young  people.  If 
the  children  of  Mr.  Kipling's  tales  are  impossible  miracles 
of  precocity  he  has  shown  in  these  later  books  that  he 
can  write  the  best  of  tales  for  real  children  to  read. 

That  Mr.  Kipling  has  been  the  most  phenomenally 
popular  author  of  our  day,  that  he  has  ceased  to  be  so 
for  more  than  a  decade,  that  he  has  taken  upon  him  to 
represent  the  life  of  the  British  Empire  all  over  the  globe, 
painting  men  in  aspects  diverse  beyond  the  daring  of 


CHAP,  ii]  NEW-COMERS  307 

any  other  writer,  are  facts  apparent  to  all.  And  if  an 
attempt  be  made  to  sift  in  impersonal  mood  the  large 
body  of  his  work,  without  deference  to  the  unbridled 
ecstasies  of  American  criticism,  now  twenty  years  old, 
or  the  chilliness  of  the  English  reviewer  in  the  present, 
a  few  further  facts  emerge  clearly — that  a  large  part  of 
Mr.  Kipling's  painting  of  life  and  character  is  journalism 
at  its  best,  that  he  barely,  if  ever,  crosses  the  line  which 
separates  him  from  creative  artists,  that  his  pictures  of 
India  are  better  than  his  painting  of  life  elsewhere, 
because  in  these  he  draws  upon  knowledge  absorbed  in 
boyhood  or  derived  from  his  father,  that  his  moments 
of  highest  inspiration  are  in  a  few  poems,  but  that  he 
is  not  a  great  poet,  that  his  sense  of  literary  responsibility 
is  slight,  that  his  chief  gift  is  a  splendid  knack  which 
often  fails  him,  that  he  has  produced  some  of  the  best 
work  in  the  last  twenty-five  years  and  some  of  the  worst, 
evidently  without  much  perception  of  the  difference.  The 
first  point  calls  for  further  discussion.  No  personalities 
can  be  found  in  the  wide  limits  of  Mr.  Kipling's  verse  and 
prose  that  are  distinctive  of  a  great  manner  in  appre- 
hending what  is  essential  in  human  nature  and  portraying 
character  that  endures  with  a  meaning  for  all  men  who 
read  or  listen.  Characters  are  not  made  to  live  by  string- 
ing dialect,  technical  phrases  or  slang  like  beads  upon  a 
string  ;  and,  in  general,  this  is  Mr.  Kipling's  method  of 
conveying  character.  The  vaunted  Mulvaney  does  not 
escape  this  indictment.  Dick  Heldar  and  Maisie  are 
unfinished  impressionism.  In  Kim  he  reaches  a  better 
standard  than  elsewhere  in  prose  with  the  lama,  Hurree 
Babu  and  the  horse  dealer,  and  only  fails  by  a  hairbreadth 
with  Kim  himself.  Yet  the  true  hero  of  this  tale  is  no 
human  figure  but  the  whole  life  of  India.  Captains 
Courageous,  Stalky  and  Co.  and  the  later  short  stories 
revert  to  the  bead-stringing  manner,  and  characterisation, 
save  in  the  roughest  pattern,  is  not  to  be  found.  In  the 
ballads  we  need  not  ask  for  characterisation,  yet  in  '  The 
Mary  Gloster  '  Mr.  Kipling  has  drawn  the  truest  and  most 
living  of  all  his  human  figures.  But  when  the  wide  field, 
the  innumerable  types  of  men  and  women  drawn,  are 
taken  into  account,  his  actual  attainment  in  characterisa- 
tion is  disappointingly  slight. 


308  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

The  three  writers  who  have  just  been  passed  in  survey 
had  developed  their  idiosyncrasies  and  characteristics 

before  the  beginning  of  the  'nineties, 
Samuel  Butler,  and  two  of  them  were  noticeably  in- 
1835-1902.  fluencing  the  growth  of  English  fiction. 

To  Samuel  Butler,  a  man  of  a  different 
mould,  another  fate  was  assigned  ;  and  it  is  difficult  to 
know  where  to  place  him,  for  he  wrote  satirical  fiction 
over  forty  years  ago,  yet  his  originality  and  intellectual 
power  have  only  been  adequately  recognised  since  his  death. 
If  we  judge  him  by  the  date  of  his  birth  he  belongs  to  a 
generation  earlier  than  any  writer  who  claims  a  prominent 
place  in  this  book.  But  if  anyone  was  placed  beyond  the 
limitations  of  chronology  it  was  Samuel  Butler — critic, 
philosopher,  painter,  musician,  novelist,  satirist  and 
scholar,  a  man  so  versatile  in  his  attainments,  so 
worthy  a  hearing  whatever  the  subject  on  which  he 
wrote,  that  he  is  not  to  be  described  by  any  single  defini- 
tion. To  the  unlearned  he  is  best  known  as  the  author 
of  Erewhon,  his  most  popular  if  not  his  best  book.  It 
was  his  only  book  to  meet  with  a  sale  on  its  appearance  ; 
and  it  was  later  awarded  the  praise  of  the  second-hand 
bookseller  in  the  formula,  "  very  readable,  6d."  In  his 
lifetime,  beyond  the  comparative  popularity  of  this  book, 
Butler  enjoyed  little  fame.  None  of  his  other  works  sold. 
Fortunately  he  was  above  the  necessity  of  writing  for 
money.  He  was  educated  at  Shrewsbury  and  St.  John's 
College,  Cambridge,  and  took  a  high  place  in  the  Classical 
Tripos.  Pie  refused  to  take  orders  because  he  entertained 
doubts  of  the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism.  A  quarrel  with 
his  father  ensued,  and  Butler  sailed  for  New  Zealand, 
where  in  five  years  on  a  sheep-run  he  succeeded  in 
gathering  a  moderate  competence,  with  which  he  returned 
to  England  to  lose  a  great  part  of  it  in  unlucky  invest- 
ments. He  began  to  write  in  New  Zealand.  Darwin 
Among  the  Machines  (1863),  the  kernel  of  Erewhon, 
appeared  in  the  Christchurch  Press.  The  book  in  its 
present  form  appeared  in  1872,  seven  years  after  Butler's 
return  to  England.  During  this  period  he  was  chiefly 
occupied  with  painting,  exhibiting  regularly  at  the  Royal 
Academy,  and  it  was  only  with  Life  and  Habit  (1877) 
that  he  definitely  turned  to  literature.  In  humble  lodgings 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  309 

at  Clifford's  Inn  he  was  content  to  live  for  thirty-eight 
years,  pursuing  an  unvarying  routine.  His  hour  of 
rising,  his  morning  meal,  the  route  of  his  daily  walk  to 
the  British  Museum,  the  periods  of  his  cigarettes  were 
exactly  regulated.  In  the  evening  he  composed  gavottes 
and  fugues  in  the  manner  of  Handel,  in  his  eyes  the 
greatest  of  musicians. 

A  man  who  obtruded  himself  so  little  on  literary  society, 
who  was  incapable  of  advertising  himself,  who  walked 
his  own  way,  who  was  full  of  hard  sayings  displeasing 
to  the  Philistine,  the  professional  man  of  letters,  the 
scholar  and  the  aesthete  alike  could  hardly  make  a  place 
for  himself  in  his  own  day.  But  Butler  was  not  without 
ambition  of  fame.  His  notebooks  reveal  a  conviction 
that  he  was  writing  for  the  future  and  that  his  name 
would  endure.  Milton  could  speak  with  no  greater  con- 
fidence in  himself.  And  Butler  was  not  deceived.  Among 
writers  belonging  to  the  period  immediately  following 
that  of  the  great  Victorians  he  is  one  of  the  few  whose 
names  are  little  likely  to  be  forgotten  by  the  generations 
to  come.  He  had  no  second-hand  opinions,  his  thought 
was  acute  and  often  profound,  his  gift  of  satire  in  prose 
has  not  been  equalled  since  Swift,  and  in  his  one  true 
novel  he  showed  powers  of  psychological  analysis  of  the 
highest  order.  And,  eccentric  as  he  may  seem  in  some 
of  his  theories  and  convictions — in  his  belief  in  the 
feminine  authorship  of  the  Odyssey,  in  his  assignation  to 
Handel  of  a  place  immeasurably  above  all  musical  com- 
posers— he  advances  no  theory  without  thought  and 
knowledge,  and  he  is  singularly  free  from  prejudice,  cant 
and  crooked  vision.  The  man  who  satirised  church-going 
religion  in  his  description  of  the  Musical  Banks,  who 
threw  scorn  on  conventional  ethical  standards,  who 
declared  that  virtue  was  not  a  thing  to  be  immoderately 
indulged,  who  wrote  an  ironical  treatise  on  the  miraculous 
element  in  the  Gospels,  could  yet  describe  himself  as  a 
member  of  the  advanced  wing  of  the  Broad  Church  party 
and  assert  that  nobody  was  of  any  account  who  did  not 
believe  in  a  kingdom  of  heaven  which  was  better  worth 
the  striving  for  than  anything  beside. 

He  was  by  instinct  a  student,  a  thinker  and  a  critic 
of  science,  art  and  literature  in  contemporary  life.  He 


810  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

combated  conventional  religion,  attacked  ecclesiastical 
conceptions  of  saintliness,  deprecated  a  morality  too 
earnest,  was  little  moved  by  visions  of  the  supernatural ; 
but  he  also  turned  to  rend  Darwinism  and  its  exile  of  the 
mind,  he  did  not  bow  to  accepted  estimates  in  art,  and 
he  had  no  fear  of  meeting  the  classical  scholar  on  his  own 
ground  with  startling  theories  which  he  backed  up  with 
evidence  stronger  than  the  supports  of  many  a  belief 
which  has  stood  the  wear  and  tear  of  centuries.  Butler 
never,  however,  controverted  the  accepted  for  the  sake 
of  originality.  He  was  entirely  free  from  weak  affecta- 
tions, poses  and  the  temptation  to  appear  different.  He 
was  a  clear  and  serious  thinker. 

His  critical  work  in  Life  and  Habit  (1877),  Essays  on  Life, 
Art  and  Science  (1904)  and  other  volumes  is  stimulating 
and  of  great  interest,  but  these  belong  to  miscellaneous 
prose-writing  and  find  no  place  for  discussion  here.  In 
Erewhon  (1872)  and  Erewhon  Revisited  (1901),  however, 
he  wrote  satirical  fiction,  and  in  The  Way  of  All  Flesh 
(1903),  a  novel  of  contemporary  life.  The  form  in  which 
Butler  embodies  his  satire  upon  society  and  religion  is 
not  new  :  the  plot  idea  in  Erewhon  is  as  old  as  Gulliver's 
Travels  and  older,  but  not  since  Swift  wrote  had  it  been 
used  with  so  pregnant  a  gift  of  irony.  Mr.  Higgs,  a 
colonist,  chances  upon  a  land  of  fertile  plains  hidden 
behind  snowy  mountains,  and  dwelling  in  these  plains 
he  discovers  a  nation  governed  by  a  king  and  queen  and 
ruled  by  extraordinary  perversities  of  thought,  of  which 
the  most  remarkable  was  a  tolerant  pity  for  moral 
delinquents,  who  were  regarded  as  suffering  from  the 
chance  misfortune  of  disease,  and  a  stern  repression 
of  physical  deformity  or  ill-health,  which  was  punished 
with  fine  or  imprisonment.  The  weak  and  the  ill  are 
haled  before  the  courts ;  but  the  man  who  forges  a 
cheque,  commits  arson  or  robs  with  violence  "  lets  it 
be  known  to  all  his  friends  that  he  is  suffering  from  a 
severe  fit  of  immorality,  just  as  we  do  when  we  are  ill, 
and  they  come  and  visit  him  with  great  solicitude." 
Furthermore,  the  inhabitants  of  Erewhon  have  passed 
severe  measures  against  the  introduction  of  machinery, 
in  obedience  to  one  of  their  philosophers  who  wrote  a 
book  describing  the  great  dangers  to  mankind  of  the 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  311 

enormously  powerful  development  of  machines,  to  which 
man  was  becoming  but  a  slave  and  attendant.  Erewhon 
contains,  in  brief,  nearly  all  Butler's  favourite  concepts 
and  ideas.  The  excursus  upon  machines  is  ridicule  of 
the  crude  form  in  which  the  theory  of  evolution  was  first 
accepted.  His  picture  of  Erewhonian  topsy-turvy  views 
on  morality  and  health  was  not  merely  a  diversion  in 
irony.  Health  and  a  sufficient  competence  are  positive 
benefits  in  any  society,  and  undue  emphasis,  he  held, 
could  be  laid  on  the  pursuit  of  virtue,  for  the  nations  we 
most  admire,  Greeks  and  Italians  for  example,  are  not 
those  most  famed  for  an  austere  morality,  and  "  when  the 
righteous  man  turneth  away  from  the  righteousness  that 
he  hath  committed,  and  doeth  that  which  is  a  little 
naughty  and  wrong,  he  will  generally  be  found  to  have 
gained  in  amiability  what  he  has  lost  in  righteousness." 
Erewhon  is  not  woven  of  one  yarn  throughout.  The 
description  of  the  Musical  Banks  is  a  little  heavy-handed, 
and  not  particularly  good  as  satire  upon  perfunctory 
religious  observances  ;  but  the  book,  as  a  whole,  is  much 
better  than  Erewhon  Revisited,  which  scarcely  succeeds 
in  rekindling  the  earlier  ironic  manner.  It  tells  how  Mr. 
Higgs  returns  to  Erewhon,  after  an  absence  of  twenty 
years,  to  find  a  new  religion  in  vogue  founded  upon  his 
own  ascent  to  heaven  when  he  escaped  from  the  country 
in  a  balloon.  Though  Butler  denied  any  intention  of 
reflecting  upon  the  Gospel  narrative  the  resemblance  is 
unfortunately  close.  The  sequel  has  more  story  and  is 
more  compact  than  Erewhon,  but  it  is  wanting  in  its 
terse  irony,  and  is  certainly  neither  so  amusing  nor  so 
interesting. 

More  important  than  either  of  these  satirical  tales  is 
the  posthumous  Way  of  All  Flesh,  which  carries  on  the 
work  of  attacking  the  system  of  sham  morality  under 
which  the  ordinary  child  of  the  age  was  educated.  The 
incentive  to  the  novel  was  supplied  by  a  Miss  Eliza  Mary 
Ann  Savage,  whom  Butler  first  met  in  1870  or  1871 ;  and 
he  continued  to  tinker  with  his  manuscript  till  the 
time  of  her  death  in  1885.  She  appears  in  the  tale  as 
Alethea.  The  compass  of  the  book  is  so  wide  that  it 
scarcely  admits  of  detailed  description.  Its  chief  end 
is  a  bitter  and  earnest  attack  upon  the  false  standards 


312  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

inculcated  by  home,  school  and  university  education, 
standards  which  Butler,  like  many  youths  of  every 
generation,  had  much  pain  in  outgrowing.  The  satire 
is  embodied  in  the  conflict  of  two  generations  of  father 
and  son,  first  the  vulgar  and  wealthy  George  Pontifex 
and  his  timid  clerical  son,  the  Reverend  Theobald  Pontifex ; 
and  secondly  between  Theobald  and  his  son,  Ernest,  who 
is  inveigled  into  taking  orders,  only  to  find  himself  in  a 
wholly  false  position.  The  novel  is  partly  autobiographical, 
and  Butler's  attacks  upon  shams  are  inspired  by  strong 
personal  feeling.  This  book,  and  not  Erewhon  Revisited, 
should  carry  as  its  epigraph  the  quotation  from  the  Iliad  : 

"  Him  do  I  hate,  even  as  I  hate  Hell  fire, 
Who  says  one  thing,  and  hides  another  in  his  heart." 

For  the  beginning  and  end  of  Butler's  writing  is  a  loathing 
and  hatred  for  crooked  vision,  darkened  counsel,  sophis- 
tries and  the  cant  of  immoderate  saintliness.  The  Way 
of  All  Flesh  is  as  little  likely  to  commend  itself  to  this  or 
any  generation  as  the  novels  of  Meredith  ;  for,  like  them, 
it  contains  strong,  clear  thinking,  and  it  is  not  the  book 
of  an  idle  hour.  And,  further,  Butler  shows  himself  not 
only  the  scholar,  the  critic  and  the  thinker,  for  in  faithful 
characterisation,  in  realism  of  atmosphere  and  in  illumina- 
tion of  satirical  humour  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  stands  with 
the  greatest  English  novels  of  the  last  century.  Psycho- 
logical sensitiveness  Butler  manifested  abundantly,  and 
the  power  to  scheme  and  plot  a  large  book  ;  but  he  fails 
to  seize  his  dramatic  situations.  Erewhon  Revisited  and 
The  Way  of  All  Flesh  abound  in  incidents  that  a  much 
weaker  pen  might  have  turned  to  far  better  use  than 
Butler.  Like  Meredith,  however,  he  was  constitutionally 
incapable  of  making  the  most  of  his  opportunities.  Like 
Meredith,  moreover,  whatever  influence  he  has  exercised 
upon  the  novel  came  late,  and  it  confines  itself  to  the 
few.  Among  younger  novelists  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  may 
be  named  as  a  writer  who  directly  or  indirectly  has  learned 
much  from  Butler,  and  the  tendency  of  many  recent 
novels  to  sketch  a  complete  biography,  or  the  story  of  a 
family  in  several  generations,  is  doubtless  attributable  to 
Butler. 


CHAP,  ii  NEW-COMERS  313 

§2 

It  will  be  well  at  this  point  to  place  two  novelists  of 
an  older  generation  whose  work,  nevertheless,  belongs  to 
recent  years,  who  deserve,  also,  to  be  named  as  influences 
upon  modern  and  younger  writers,  although  in  originality 
of  concept  and  forcefulness  of  work  they  can  hardly  be 
counted  with  Gissing,  Butler  or  Mr.  George  Moore. 

Theodore  Watts-Dunton  was  first  hi  power  a  critic, 
secondly  a  poet,  and  thirdly  a  novelist.  Yet  his  single 
novel  won  an  instant  reputation  fully 
Walter  Theodore  equal  to  its  deserts.  Aylwin  (1898) 
Watts-Dunton,  was  written  many  years  before  its 

1836-1914.  publication,  but  withheld  from  the 

press  till  the  success  of  the  gipsy 
romance  contained  in  the  poem-sequence,  The  Coming  of 
Love,  induced  the  author  to  print  it.  In  narrative,  how- 
ever, The  Coming  of  Love  is  a  sequel  to  Aylwin.  The  novel 
succeeded  for  some  years  in  winning  critical  and  popular 
admiration,  for  there  is  undeniable  magic  in  Watts- 
Dunston's  description  of  Snowdonia  and  the  wild  scenery 
of  West  Wales,  there  is  charm  in  the  love-story  and  in  the 
drawing  of  the  character  of  Sinfi  Lovell,  there  is  pathos 
and  tragic  surprise  in  the  narrative,  there  is  interest  in 
the  introduction  of  Rossetti  and  others  under  assumed 
names.  Nevertheless  the  whole  book  only  too  obviously 
betrays  its  slow  and  laboured  birth  ;  and  birth  is  scarcely 
the  apt  word — the  tale  has  been  put  together,  not  born. 
Passages  of  descriptive  writing,  thoughts  contained  in 
the  dialogue  or  narrative,  are  beautiful  and  true,  but 
they  survive  in  detachment ;  that  unity  of  movement 
and  that  development  of  the  characters  in  a  conceivable 
relationship,  which  can  alone  give  the  illusion  of  life,  are 
wanting.  As  a  good  novel  and  a  truthful  rendering  of 
life  Aylwin  fails  ;  its  inspiration  is  an  intellectual  roman- 
ticism, its  theme  the  power  of  love  to  reveal  the  beauty 
and  mystery  of  the  universe  ;  and,  considered  in  this 
aspect,  it  is  a  secondary  landmark  in  the  literary  history 
of  the  period.  At  a  time  when  the  current  set  toward  a 
mingling  of  introspective  psychology  and  bare  realism  it 
exerted  some  influence  in  the  direction  of  poetry  and 
intellectual  mysticism. 


314  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

The  novelist  who  was  born  while  Coleridge  and  Lamb 
were  still  alive,  who  moved  in  George  Eliot's  circle  of 
friends,    can   hardly   without   violence, 
Mark  Rutherford,      it  may  seem,  find  a  place  in  a  volume 
1829-1913.  which  treats,  for  its  purposes,  Steven- 

son and  Meredith  as  belonging  to  a  past, 
and  Mark  Rutherford  (William  Hale  White)  was  in  many 
respects  a  man  of  the  Victorian  epoch  ;  his  Radicalism 
and  his  rebellion  against  the  doctrines  of  dissenting 
Christianity  are  Victorian  in  the  form  of  their  unorthodoxy, 
and  the  English  life  he  depicts  is  largely  Nonconformist 
and  middle-class  life  of  the  'forties  and  'fifties.  But  the 
novels  were  the  work  of  his  later  life,  his  death  is  fresh 
in  the  memory,  and  the  close  realism  of  his  psychology, 
his  impressionistic  manner  of  outlining  scenes  and 
incidents  suggest  a  prim  and  distant  resemblance  to  some 
writers  of  the  Yellow  Book.  William  Hale  White  led  a 
curious  if  uneventful  life.  His  father  was  of  lower  middle- 
class  stock  and  successively  earned  a  livelihood  as  a  com- 
positor, a  tanner  and  a  door-keeper  to  the  House  of 
Commons.  He  passed  on  to  his  son  the  incongruous  gifts 
of  a  love  of  Byron  and  a  training  for  the  Noncomformist 
ministry.  But  Mark  Rutherford,  to  use  his  pen-name, 
was  expelled  from  New  College,  St.  John's  Wood,  for 
heresy,  and  abandoned  all  idea  of  the  ministry.  This  part 
of  his  life  is  retold  in  the  most  autobiographical  of  his 
novels,  The  Revolution  in  Tanner's  Lane  (1887).  After 
leaving  his  theological  seminary  he  turned  journalist  and 
hack-writer,  and  later  became  a  civil  servant  with  a  post 
in  the  Admiralty.  The  means  and  ample  leisure  of  a  civil 
servant  set  him  free  to  write  his  novels,  and  he  soon  won 
the  admiration  of  a  small  but  enthusiastic  circle  of  readers. 
H.  D.  Traill  was  among  the  first  to  recognise  the  originality 
of  his  work  ;  and  he  has  been  declared  a  greater  than 
Meredith.  In  fifteen  years  he  wrote  half  a  dozen  novels,  of 
no  great  length,  delineating  the  life  and  mind  of  that  part 
of  the  Radical  middle  class  whose  thoughts  centre  in  the 
activities  of  little  dissenting  chapels.  There  are,  besides 
the  novel  already  named,  The  Autobiography  of  Mark 
Rutherford  (1881),  Mark  Rutherford's  Deliverance  (1885), 
Miriam's  Schooling  (1890),  Catherine  Furze  (1894)  and 
Clare  Hopgood  (1896). 


CHAP.  IT  NEW-COMERS  315 

Mark  Rutherford,  if  occasionally  he  suggest  com- 
parisons, has  a  place  peculiarly  his  own.  His  style  is 
staid,  his  manner  grave  ;  but  his  ideas,  religious  and 
moral,  are  often  distinctly  unorthodox.  His  stories  are 
without  sensational  incident,  his  people  belong  to  drab 
corners  of  life,  yet  there  is  an  intensity  in  his  pictures  of 
trivial,  sad,  weary  and  unimaginative  lives  which  compels 
recognition,  and  we  discover  beneath  his  searching  realism 
a  deep  fund  of  sympathy  for  everything  save  cant  and 
humbug.  In  a  quiet  way  Mark  Rutherford  has  won  for 
himself  a  reputation  which  will  probably  endure. 


§3 

The  influence  of  French  models  in  fiction  during  the 
last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  has  been  noted, 
and  the  typical  exemplification  of  French  realistic  methods 
in  the  early  novels  of  Mr.  George  Moore.  In  these  he 
anticipated  the  aims  and  ideals  of  younger  writers,  many 
of  whom  found  encouragement  and  opportunity  with  the 
publication  of  the  Yellow  Book  ;  for  the  editor,  Harland, 
was  strongly  influenced  by  the  French  spirit,  although 
by  its  delicacy,  gaiety  and  love  of  beauty  in  form  rather 
than  its  tendency  to  logic  and  exactness.  In  this  group, 
among  the  naturalists  in  the  following  of  Maupassant 
and  Zola,  the  best  work  was  done  by  Hubert  Crackan- 
thorpe  and  George  Egerton  (Mrs.  Golding  Bright).  The 
former  died  young  and  George  Egerton  has  lived  to  change 
her  style  and  methods,  and  her  work  will  be  noted  in  a 
subsequent  section  with  that  of  other  women  novelists. 
Harland  and  Ernest  Dowson  wrote  slight  and  impres- 
sionistic tales  with  a  leaning  to  the  more  serious  method 
of  Crackanthorpe ;  and  with  them  may  be  counted  the 
journalist  and  poet,  H.  D.  Lowry,  who  came  under  the 
influence  of  Henley  and  the  National  Observer.  Among 
others  of  the  same  group  who,  either  during  the  life  of 
the  Yellow  Book  and  Savoy  or  later,  wrote  some  fiction, 
were  Mr.  Arthur  Symons,  Max  Beerbohm,  John  Davidson, 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  Mr.  Laurence  Housman. 

Hubert   Crackanthorpe   is   now   remembered    by   few ; 
his   life    was    short,    he    was    much    in   earnest,   and   is, 


316  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

therefore,  now  practically  forgotten.  In  The  Times  of 
Christmas  Day,  1896,  appeared  a  report  that  Crackan- 
thorpe's  body  had  been  found  in  the 
Hubert  Crackan-  Seine.  Two  months  before  this  he  had 
thorpe,  1865-1896.  disappeared  from  his  hotel ;  and  it  is 
probable  that  death  was  of  his  own 
choosing.  The  general  attitude  toward  his  work  is  well 
expressed  by  The  Times'  comment :  "  His  volume  of 
short  stories,  called  Wreckage,  contained  much  that  was 
good,  though  the  impression  it  left  was  unpleasant  .  .  . 
there  was  ground  to  hope  that  increasing  years  would 
bring  greater  breadth  of  vision."  After  his  death  the 
volume  of  Last  Studies  (1897)  was  published,  prefaced 
with  a  laboured  poem  by  Stopford  Brooke  and  a 
critical  introduction,  grudging  and  not  peculiarly  illu- 
minating, from  the  pen  of  Henry  James.  The  latter 
is  puzzled  by  the  "  predominance  of  the  consciousness 
of  the  cruelty  of  life,  the  expression,  from  volume  to 
volume,  of  the  deep  insecurity  of  things "  ;  and  he 
breathes  the  pious  belief  that  these  were  but  youthful 
weaknesses  which  Crackanthorpe,  had  he  lived,  would 
have  outgrown.  Henry  James,  the  student  of  the  leisured 
and  cultured  margins  of  life,  shows  here  a  little  obtuse- 
ness.  Hubert  Crackanthorpe  was  a  modest,  gentle- 
natured  young  Englishman,  with  a  love  of  country  scenery 
and  field  sports,  and  a  sincere  repulsion  from  the  sordid 
misery  which  represented  the  ordinary  life  of  so  large  a 
proportion  of  town  populations.  Inspired  in  his  art  by 
the  short  story  of  Maupassant  he  garners  his  material 
from  direct  observation  of  life,  writing  straightforwardly 
and  uncompromisingly  to  show  exactly  what  he  sees. 
His  method  is  summarised  by  Mr.  Symons — "  bare,  hard, 
persistent  realism,  the  deliberately  unsympathetic  record 
of  sordid  things."  Crackanthorpe  was  neither  a  prophet 
of  smooth  things  nor  one  who  stooped  to  make  the  bid 
for  popularity.  Among  that  youthful  band  who  con- 
tributed to  the  Yellow  Book  the  name  of  Crackanthorpe 
stands  out.  His  work  showed  high  promise ;  and  his 
early  death  was  a  real  loss  to  English  fiction. 

In  1892  Crackanthorpe  was,  with  W.  H.  Wilkins,  editor 
of  The  Albemarle,  and  in  the  following  year  he  published 
Wreckage  (1893),  a  volume  of  short  stories.  The  title, 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  317 

upon  its  face,  carries  the  subject  of  the  book  :  the  flotsam 
and  the  jetsam  of  humanity,  men  and  women  driven  to 
the  last  end  of  despair  and  suicide,  these  are  the  characters 
whom  we  meet  in  a  book  which  deserves  to  be  remembered, 
for  every  story  in  the  collection  reflects  the  gentleness  and 
simplicity  of  a  sincere  and  thoughtful  mind.  And  Crackan- 
thorpe  writes  with  a  clearness  and  directness  well  suited 
to  the  subjects  he  handles.  His  treatment  is  admirable, 
his  phrases  and  analysis  skilful.  He  writes,  for  example, 
of  a  sordid  London  street :  "  There  was  an  untidiness 
about  the  neighbourhood,  an  untidiness  that  was  almost 
indecent,  the  untidiness  of  a  bed  that  has  been  slept  in." 
In  a  single  stroke  he  pictures  the  dingy,  neglected  street. 
And,  broadly  speaking,  this  is  the  manner  of  Crackan- 
thorpe.  He  does  not  make  the  mistake  of  Zola  or  of 
Mr.  George  Moore  in  A  Mummer's  Wife,  of  wearying  with 
photographic  completeness  in  representation.  The  two 
best  stories  in  the  book  are  '  A  Conflict  of  Egoisms  '  and 
the  astonishingly  powerful  sketch,  '  A  Dead  Woman,' 
possibly  suggested  by  Maupassant's  '  Inconsolables.'  In 
the  latter  we  are  introduced  to  the  dull  atmosphere  of  a 
village  inn,  moribund  since  the  death  of  the  publican's 
wife.  The  husband  sinks  into  a  state  of  apathy  until  he 
is  roused  by  learning  from  the  slatternly  barmaid  that 
his  wife  was  guilty  of  misconduct  with  a  local  farmer, 
his  friend.  The  blow  at  first  overwhelms,  and  then  excites 
him  to  anger.  A  fierce  quarrel  follows,  but  in  the  end 
we  see  husband  and  lover  discussing,  over  friendly  drinks, 
the  physical  attractions  of  the  dead  woman  and  the  course 
of  the  guilty  love-affair.  It  is  repulsive  and  unpleasant ; 
but  it  rings  true.  Stories  like  this,  and  others  in  the  same 
manner,  were  not  directed  to  gain  a  favourable  hearing 
with  the  many,  and  Crackanthorpe  had  to  meet  with 
much  reviling  and  antagonism.  Yet  Wreckage  contains 
some  of  the  finest  and  simplest  of  short  stories  ;  and  it 
is  impossible  not  to  recognise  in  the  style  and  high  serious- 
ness of  these  tales  the  work  of  a  man  who  felt  strongly 
and  looked  out  on  life  with  grave  earnestness.  To  Crackan- 
thorpe was  given  a  sensitiveness  which  felt  the  pain  of 
life  more  keenly  than  its  happiness.  And  he  writes 
severely  because  he  is  utterly  sincere,  determined  to  be 
faithful  to  that  which  he  has  seen  and  known. 


818  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

None  of  the  stories  in  Sentimental  Studies  (1895)  is  as 
arresting  as  several  in  Wreckage.  The  title  suggests  a 
partial  change  in  manner,  but  it  is  by  no  means  a  good 
title,  and  better  suited  to  a  volume  by  Harland  or  Dowson. 
'  Battledore  and  Shuttlecock  '  is  a  realistic  tale  in  the 
manner  of  Wreckage :  the  '  Set  of  Village  Tales,'  at  the 
end  of  the  volume,  are,  however,  of  a  slightly  different 
genre.  They  illustrate  Crackanthorpe's  power  of  repro- 
ducing environment  with  a  clear  simplicity.  A  little  bare, 
a  little  melancholy  these  sketches,  yet  they  betray  the 
essential  gentleness  of  Crackanthorpe's  character.  They 
suggest  sharp  and  clean  etching  with  a  brilliant  surface 
effect. 

The  tiny  volume,  Vignettes  (1896),  is  chiefly  of  interest 
in  introducing  us  to  Crackanthorpe's  workshop.  The 
book  is  a  collection  of  excerpts  from  his  notebooks, 
jottings  of  impressions  in  London  and  abroad ;  and  they 
show  how  he  learned  to  observe,  taught  himself  to  recognise 
the  chief  attributes  of  each  scene,  and  patiently  set  him- 
self to  convey  these  to  paper.  As  an  example  of  his 
method  one  of  the  vignettes  may  be  quoted. 

"  The  entertainment  draws  to  its  close,  for  it  is  past 
four  in  the  morning.  In  the  hall,  several  of  the  oil- 
lamps  have  already  sputtered  out ;  the  rest  are  burning 
with  dull,  blear-eyed  weariness.  A  score  of  unshaven 
Spaniards,  close  muffled  in  capas  and  lowering  som- 
breros, sprawl  in  limp  attitudes  over  empty  benches, 
and  the  circle  of  gaudy  women  that  fill  the  stage  sit 
listless,  pasty-faced,  somnolent. 

And  then,  for  the  last  time,  the  frenzy  passes.  The 
guitars  start  their  sudden,  bitter  twanging,  and  the 
women  their  wild  rhythmical  beating  of  hands. 

Amid  volleys  of  harsh,  frenzied  plaudits  la  Monolita 
dances,  swaying  her  soft,  girlish  frame  with  a  tense, 
exasperated  restraint ;  supple  as  a  serpent ;  coyly, 
subtly  lascivious  ;  languidly  curling  and  uncurling  her 
bare  white  arms. 

Out  in  the  cold  night  air,  as  I  hasten  home  through 
the  narrow,  sleeping  streets,  her  soft,  girlish  frame 
still  sways  before  my  eyes,  to  the  bitter  twanging  of 
guitars." 


CHAP,  ii]  NEW-COMERS 

'  Anthony  Garstin's  Courtship,'  a  tale  of  tragic  wooing 
among  Cumberland  country-folk  and  the  first  story  in 
Crackanthorpe's  posthumous  volume,  Last  Studies,  is  one 
of  his  finest  and  strongest  pieces  of  writing,  a  dialect  story 
simply  and  broadly  narrated  in  a  manner  that  would  not 
shame  Mr.  Hardy.  The  other  two  stories  of  the  last  volume 
do  not,  however,  reach  the  standard  of  his  best  work. 

Crackanthorpe  was  not  wholly  without  humour,  but 
in  his  writing  it  appears  only  as  a  tinge  of  irony.  He  had 
no  faculty  for  suffering  the  defects  of  life  gladly ;  and 
tolerance  of  painful  incongruity  is  the  foundation  of 
humour.  Crackanthorpe  would  not  have  denied  that  life 
had  its  glad  moments  and  margins  of  satisfaction,  but 
he  looked  straight  before  him  and  saw  only  the  broad 
page  of  unhappiness  between  the  margins.  Realists, 
French  and  English,  have  not  always  been  men  of  the 
finest  and  gentlest  instincts  :  Crackanthorpe  is  often  the 
most  drab  of  realists,  yet  we  never  lose  consciousness  of 
a  refined  and  sensitive  nature  in  the  writer  of  these  hard, 
dry-point  sketches  and  tales.  It  is  probable  that  they  will 
drop  further  from  sight  as  time  passes  ;  but  with  the 
few  the  name  of  Crackanthorpe  will  be  remembered  for 
his  genius  in  observation  and  character-drawing,  and  for 
the  undeviating  sincerity  of  his  work. 

Henry  Harland,  Ernest  Dowson  and  H.  D.  Lowry  also 
came  under  French  influences  in  the  writing  of  fiction, 
but  with  them  these  influences  developed 
Henry  Harland,  in  the  form  of  a  sentimental  and  nervous 
1861-1905.  impressionism.  Harland's  early  life  and 

training  made  him  a  citizen  of  no 
nation.  He  was  an  American  born  in  St.  Petersburg, 
and  he  was  educated  in  America,  Rome  and  Paris.  His 
first  novels  dealt  chiefly  with  American-Jewish  life,  and 
were  published  under  the  pseudonym  Sidney  Luska.  His 
first  book,  As  it  was  Written  :  A  Jewish  Musician  s  Story 
(1885),  and  others  which  succeeded  it,  followed  the  track 
of  sensationalism.  In  1890  he  came  to  London  and  pub- 
lished under  his  own  name  Two  Women  or  One  (1890)  and 
Mea  Culpa:  A  Woman's  Last  Word  (1891).  But  in  1898, 
with  the  publication  of  Mademoiselle  Miss  and  Other 
Stories,  his  better  style  appeared,  and  in  the  following  year 
he  attained  prominence  when  he  was  appointed  editor  of 


820  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

the  Yelloiv  Book.  Mademoiselle  Miss  contains  five  short 
tales,  which  first  exhibit,  and  notably  in  the  title-story, 
that  charm  of  light  and  airy  style,  that  graceful  humour 
which  are  commonly  associated  with  the  name  of  Harland. 
These  sketches,  for  they  are  sketches  rather  than  tales, 
in  their  air  of  inconsequence  often  remind  us  of  Maupassant. 
They  lead  to  nothing,  and  their  only  charm  is  the  art 
with  which  characters  are  hit  off  and  environment  painted 
with  deft,  quick  phrases.  The  two  best  tales  have  a 
French  setting.  '  Mademoiselle  Miss  '  shows  the  unsophis- 
ticated little  English  governess  flung  by  chance  into  a 
cheap  Parisian  hotel  and  the  company  of  students  and 
etudiantes  who  were  "  to  put  it  squarely  the  most  dis- 
reputable family  in  Europe."  The  other,  '  The  Funeral 
March  of  a  Marionette,'  is  a  sketch  of  the  death  of  a 
vicious  little  cocote.  The  story  reveals  that  vein  of  tender 
pathos  which  Harland  possessed  in  addition  to  gifts  of 
gaiety  and  wit.  Of  the  cocote 's  funeral  procession  he 
writes  : 

"  To-morrow  women  (who  would  have  shrunk  from 
her  in  her  lifetime,  as  from  something  pestilential)  will 
reverently  cross  themselves,  and  men  (who  would  have 
.  .  .  ah,  well,  it  is  best  not  to  remember  what  the  men 
would  have  done)  will  decently  bare  their  heads,  as 
her  poor  coffin  is  borne  through  the  streets  on  its  way 
to  the  graveyard." 

Harland  was  a  master  0f  the  short  sketch,  not  of  the 
story  ;  1'or  he  was  wanting  in  invention  and  his  imagina- 
tion was  not  strong.  Grey  Roses  (1895),  another  collection 
of  sketches,  not  only  follows  the  manner  and  subject- 
matter  of  Mademoiselle  Miss,  it  repeats  incidents  and 
sentences  almost  word  for  word.  In  '  The  Reward  of 
Virtue,'  for  example,  Harland  uses  again,  with  slight 
transposition  the  incident  and  the  words  already  referred 
to,  when  we  are  told  that  men  bared  their  heads  and 
women  crossed  themselves  who  would  have  spurned  in 
life  the  old  vagabond  of  the  BouF  Miche.  And  this  is 
not  the  only  instance  of  close  repetition.  In  these  two 
volumes  of  sketches  and  short  tales  Harland  is,  perhaps, 
at  his  best,  although  it  was  with  the  pretty  and  senti- 
mental love-stories  of  The  Cardinal's  Snuff-box  (1900) 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  321 

and  The  Lady  Paramount  (1902)  that  he  won  great 
popularity.  These  are  graceful,  witty  and  decorative,  but 
their  substance  is  slight  and  their  atmosphere  unreal. 

Harland  never  attempts  the  large  theme,  his  gift  lies 
in  the  short  story  which  sketches  men  and  women  in 
moods  not  too  serious  and  graces  vignettes  of  life  with 
gay  humour  and  delicate  pathos.  Though  not  ambitious 
his  work  has  the  charm  of  truth  within  its  limitations. 
The  pathos  of  '  The  Reward  of  Virtue  '  and  '  When  I  am 
King  '  is  simple,  unforced  and  wholly  free  from  exaggera- 
tion. And  in  Harland  we  recognise  the  stylist,  the  man 
who  can  be  conversant  with  good  literature  without 
thrusting  pedantry  upon  us.  The  lightness  of  his  wit 
and  humour  are  things  to  take  joy  in.  His  strength  lay 
in  brief  and  impressionistic  tales  ;  and  as  an  editor  he 
was  less  successful.  The  Yellow  Book,  with  the  men  and 
the  material  he  had  to  his  hand,  ought  to  have  been  a 
finer  periodical. 

Ernest  Dowson  is  to  be  counted  with  the  poets,  but  the 
little  prose  he  has  left  behind  him  has,  with  his  verse,  a 
charm  of  sentiment  and  evanescent 
Ernest  Dowson,  cynicism.  The  sub-title  of  Dilemmas 
1867-1900.  (1895),  '  Stories  and  Studies  in  Senti- 

ment,' expresses  well  the  nature  of  his 
poetry,  and  the  title  of  the  book  aptly  describes  the  prose 
sketches,  for  they  are  studies  in  cases  of  conscience  rather 
than  mere  sentiment.  Each  story  is  a  tale  of  loss  and 
the  irony  of  circumstance — a  man  and  woman  lost  to 
each  through  a  mistake  and  the  treachery  of  a  friend, 
a  pupil  lost  to  a  master  who  sinks  into  poverty  while 
she  becomes  a  famous  prima  donna,  forgetfulness  of  an 
early  friend  for  the  sake  of  fame,  the  mistake  of  a  man 
who  hoards  wealth  that  he  may  be  in  a  position  to  marry 
the  woman  of  his  heart,  forgetting  that  both  grow  old 
and  the  world  is  changing  for  them.  The  most  dramatic 
of  these  tales  is  '  A  Case  of  Conscience.'  Two  men  love 
one  woman.  One  knows  that  he  ought  not  to  marry, 
though  she  has  consented,  for  he  has  not  confessed  that 
he  is  a  divorced  man,  and  she,  as  a  Roman  Catholic,  if 
she  marries  him  and  discovers  his  past  will  believe  her- 
self to  be  living  in  open  sin  ;  the  other  will  not  enlighten 
her  lest  he  should  seem  to  be  actuated  for  the  sake  of 


322  THE  NOVEL  [PART  rsr 

his  love  and  not  her  happiness.  The  issue  is  left  unsolved. 
The  motive  of  these  stories — life's  little  ironies — belongs 
peculiarly  to  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  though  Dowson's  treat- 
ment is  different  and  more  sentimental.  All  have  the 
charm  of  that  tender  melancholy  which  marks  Dowson's 
poetry,  and  decidedly,  even  as  stories,  they  are  not 
negligible  ;  for  they  have  point  and  are  well  told.  But 
the  character-drawing  is  wanting  in  power  of  detachment. 
Dowson  rings  the  changes  upon  one  or  two  types  he  is 
able  to  understand,  and  the  others  he  neglects. 

Henry  Dawson  Lowry,  was,  like  Dowson,  a  poet,  and 

his  sketches  and  short  stories  in  some  degree  resemble 

the    mood    and     temper     in     which 

Henry  Dawson  Lowry,  Dilemmas  was  written.  Lowry' s  first 
1869-1906.  work  of  any  note  was  the  series 

of  short  stories,  Wreckers  and  Metho- 
dists (1893),  and  this  was  soon  followed  by  Women's 
Tragedies  (1895).  These  two  volumes  contain  sketches 
and  stories  of  life  in  his  native  Cornwall,  told  with  a 
restraint  and  distinction  of  style  which  mark  them  as 
work  far  above  the  average  of  the  short  tale  written  to 
meet  the  needs  of  the  magazine-devouring  public.  They 
reveal  a  thoughtful  and  ordered  mind,  and  a  nature  lonely 
and  melancholy,  but  not  morbid.  In  the  combination  of 
an  exquisite  delicacy  and  a  reserved  power  '  The  Man  in 
the  Room,'  a  story  of  the  second  volume,  almost  takes  the 
breath  with  astonishment.  His  novel,  A  Man  of  Moods 
(1896),  on  the  other  hand,  though  distinguished  by  the 
style  which  never  deserted  Lowry,  has  little  else  to  recom- 
mend it ;  and  the  child's  book,  Make  Believe  (1896), 
though  beautiful  in  passages,  is  apt  to  drag  and  run 
heavily. 

Mr.  Symons,  with  the  exception  of  John  Davidson,  the 
most  notable  of  the  younger  poets  in  this  group,  is  scarcely 

in  any  wise  to  be  counted  a  writer  of 
Arthur  Symons,  fiction,  though  one  volume  of  short 
b.  1865.  stories,  published  late  in  his  life, 

stands  to  his  credit.  Spiritual  Ad- 
ventures (1905),  a  book  of  imaginative  tales  and  psycho- 
logical studies  is  of  interest  in  the  element  of  autobiography 
it  contains.  Its  first  sketch,  '  A  Prelude  to  Life,'  is  in  a 
form  scarcely  disguised  the  story  of  the  development  of 


CHAP.  11]  NEW-COMERS  323 

Mr.  Symons'  mind  and  imagination  in  early  years.  The 
reference  is  obvious  when  the  hero  of  this  sketch  con- 
fesses that  for  the  first  five  years  in  London  he  felt  an 
unceasing  delight  in  the  mere  fact  of  being  there. 

"  I  had  never  cared  greatly  for  the  open  air  in  the 
country,  the  real  open  air,  because  everything  in  the 
country,  except  the  sea,  bored  me  ;  but  here,  in  the 
'  motley  '  Strand,  among  these  hurrying  people,  under 
the  smoky  sky,  I  could  walk  and  yet  watch.  If  ever 
there  was  a  religion  of  the  eyes,  I  have  devoutly  practised 
that  religion.  I  noted  every  face  that  passed  me  on 
the  pavement." 

In  this  confession  lies  the  secret  of  the  origin  of  half  the 
poems  in  Silhouettes  and  London  Nights. 

The  other  sketches  are  of  a  more  general  character, 
and  relate,  for  example,  the  story  of  a  woman  who  becomes 
a  great  actress  in  a  moment  of  passionate  wrath  at  being 
displaced  by  a  rival,  and  the  story  of  a  Cornish  fisherman 
who  sins  the  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost  for  the  sake  of 
the  Lord.  The  curious  and  remote  in  the  psychology  of 
character  is  the  chief  interest  of  these  sketches. 

Four  other  writers  have  been  named  who  had  some 
connection  with  either  the  Yellow  Book  or  The  Savoy, 
who  have  chiefly  won  fame  in  other 
John  Davidson,  fields,  and  yet  at  some  period  of  their 
1857-1909.  lives  made  essays  in  the  writing  of  prose- 
fiction.  In  manner  and  style  they  have 
no  relation  to  each  other,  nor  is  their  fiction  of  any 
special  merit  or  importance,  and  they  may,  therefore, 
be  briefly  dismissed.  John  Davidson,  as  has  been  noted 
elsewhere,  wrote  a  few  novels  in  early  life  in  the  hope 
of  earning  money  by  them ;  but  poetry  was  his  joy  and  the 
end  of  his  being.  Perfervid  (1890),  however,  has  merit  as 
a  novel,  and  is  not  to  be  set  aside  as  a  mere  money-making 
venture.  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  was  one  of  the  brightest 
luminaries  in  the  constellation  of  the  Yellow 
Max  Beerbohm,  Book  ;  but  he  is  a  caricaturist,  an  essayist 
b.  1872.  and  parodist.  He  was  early  distinguished 

as  "  brilliant  "  ;  he  neither  achieved  bril- 
liance nor  had  it  thrust  upon  him.  The  word  exactly 
defines  '  A  Defence  of  Cosmetics  '  and  other  essays  which 


324  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

appeared  in  the  Yellow  Book  and  elsewhere,  and  were 
afterwards  republished  in  volume  form  ;  it  describes  the 
witty  aptness  of  the  parodies  in  A  Christmas  Garland 
(1912)  ;  and,  above  all,  it  describes  his  caricatures.  For 
twenty  years  he  has  been  the  only  caricaturist  of  any 
eminence  or  genius  in  England ;  for  he  realises  that 
caricature  must  exaggerate  the  essential  and  not  the 
inessential ;  and,  therefore,  his  caricatures  are  criticism. 
His  true  fame  will  rest  upon  his  genius  as  a  draughtsman 
and  caricaturist ;  but,  at  the  least,  he  touches  with 
brilliance  anything  he  attempts.  His  novel,  Zuleika 
Dobson  (1911),  a  piece  of  fantastic  wit  and  satire,  came 
as  a  surprise.  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse  discovers  in  its  pages 
a  bergamot  perfume  exhaled  and  communicated  from  the 
pages  of  John  Inglesant ;  but  in  this  discovery  he  is, 
perhaps,  inspired  with  something  of  the  fancifulness  of 
the  narrative  of  which  he  writes.  The  spirit  of  Oxford, 
its  truth,  its  charm,  and  its  absurdity,  is  inimitably  caught 
in  this  fantastic  tale  of  the  loves  of  an  undergraduate  duke 
and  a  popular  conjurer-actress.  And  the  ground  of  reality, 
as  in  the  caricatures,  is  always  there.  In  his  novel,  if 
novel  it  may  be  called,  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  shows  that 
his  gift  of  satirical  wit  is  with  his  caricature  grounded  in 
the  real. 

Like  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  Mr.  Laurence  Housman  con- 
tributed  both  to  the  text  and  the  illustrations  of  the 
Yellow  Book,  but  his  versatility  is  of 
Laurence  Housman,     another  kind.     In  the  first  decade  of 
b.  1867.  his    literary   life    he    was    not   among 

authors  popular  at  the  lending  library. 
His  poetry  was  obscure,  and,  more  distasteful  to  English 
readers,  mystical ;  and  the  appeal  of  his  prose-allegories 
was  chiefly  literary.  But  in  1900  he  published  anony- 
mously a  book  which  excited  the  dulled  sensibilities  of 
subscribers  to  the  libraries  ;  and  for  a  short  time  An 
Englishwoman's  Love-letters  became  the  butt  of  parodists 
and  the  rival  of  the  weather  in  conversation.  Beautiful, 
artificial,  melancholy,  and  even  in  the  ecstasy  of  love  a 
little  morbid,  these  letters  reflect  the  involvements  of 
Mr.  Housman' s  earnest,  wistful,  tearful  pathos.  The 
moods  of  his  verse  are  reflected  throughout  in  the  English- 
woman's Love-letters  ;  but  the  subscribers  to  the  lending 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  825 

libraries  had  not  read  his  poetry.  A  passage  like  the 
following  may  be  matched  more  than  once  or  twice  in  his 
verse  : 

"  I  wonder  what,  to  the  starving  and  drought- 
stricken,  the  taste  of  death  can  be  likej  Do  all  the 
rivers  of  the  world  run  together  to  the  lips  then  and 
all  its  fruits  strike  suddenly  to  the  taste  when  the  long 
deprivation  ceases  to  be  a  want  ?  Or  is  it  simply  a 
ceasing  hunger  and  thirst — an  antidote  to  it  all  ?  " 

As  documents  purporting  to  come  from  life  these  letters 
are  too  strident  of  mannerisms  and  studied  phrasings, 
too  intellectual  to  be  the  utterance  of  a  heart-felt  love. 
No  woman  could  write  thus  unless  she  were  thinking 
more  of  herself  than  the  man  to  whom  she  was  sending 
the  letter.  As  love-letters  they  are  self-condemned  ;  for 
they  represent  an  emotion  other  than  love  ;  the  gaze  is 
turned  inward  not  outward.  The  letters  of  George 
Egerton's  Rosa  Amoroso,  (1901),  which  appeared  almost 
simultaneously  with  An  Englishwoman's  Love-letters, 
though  they  attracted  less  attention,  show  greater  know- 
ledge of  the  heart,  and  are  a  far  more  successful  essay  in 
the  same  manner  of  writing.  Mr.  Housman's  book  is 
virtually  a  novel  in  epistolary  form,  for  it  traces  narrative 
from  the  blossoming  of  love  to  the  withering  of  hope  ; 
and  its  success  led  Mr.  Housman  to  fresh  efforts  in  the 
field  of  fiction  with  A  Modern  Antceus  (1901)  and  Sabrina 
Warham  (1904).  The  legend  of  Antaeus,  slain  only  when 
deprived  of  the  magic  touch  of  Mother  Earth,  has  evidently 
long  occupied  Mr.  Housman's  imagination,  for  he  writes 
a  poem  on  the  theme  in  his  first  volume  of  verse  ;  and 
his  first  novel  in  direct  narrative  is  the  story  of  one  who 
in  our  modern  wrorld  lived  close  to  the  breast  of  Earth 
and  drew  sustenance  from  her.  It  is  a  long  novel :  its 
direct  realism  and  the  dramatic  force  of  its  incidents  are 
in  surprising  contrast  to  the  cryptic  mysticism  of  his  earlier 
work.  Sabrina  Warham  (1904)  is  a  more  straggling  story, 
and  hardly  so  strongly  or  vividly  written.  Both  these 
tales  are  set  against  a  background  of  the  English  country- 
side. But  Mr.  Housman's  genius  does  not  readily  turn 
to  the  realistic  representation  of  everyday  life,  and  he  is 
more  successful  in  sustaining  interest  in  John  of  Jingalo 


326  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

(1912)  and  The  Royal  Runaway  (1914),  whimsical  yet 
direct  and  pointed  satires  upon  things  monarchical, 
political,  religious  and  social  in  contemporary  English  life. 
Nearly  all  problems  and  activities  of  the  day  are  intro- 
duced, including  the  cause  of  woman  suffrage,  to  which 
Mr.  Housman  has  so  heartily  given  of  his  time,  and  the 
censorship  of  plays  from  which  he  has  suffered.  He  is 
wanting  in  the  acid  quality  of  greater  satirists,  but  the 
satire  is  purposive,  and  without  departing  far  from  things 
as  they  are  he  succeeds  in  throwing  the  life  of  to-day  into 
humorous  relief.  Indeed,  it  is  hard  to  connect  these  books 
with  the  author  of  Green  Arras  and  Spikenard. 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  widely  as  he  differs  in  every  other 
respect  from  Mr.  Laurence  Housman,  has  this,  at  least, 

in  common  with  him  that  he  is  a  satirist, 
Bernard  Shaw,  and  in  early  life  he  wrote  several  poor 
b.  1856.  and  unsuccessful  satirical  novels.  They 

were  refused  by  all  publishers  and  struggled 
to  life  in  the  pages  of  magazines  which  expired  soon  after 
printing  the  young  novelist's  contributions.  But  these 
early  efforts  in  fiction  have  a  common  characteristic,  which 
usually  belongs  to  the  financial  triumph  of  each  year — 
they  are  not  important  as  literature  nor  have  they  any 
great  interest  or  significance.  And  their  author  is  not 
least  ready  to  relegate  them  to  a  position  of  unimportance 
and  entitle  them  "  Novels  of  My  Nonage."  Immaturity 
(1879)  never  appeared  in  print,  but  its  very  title  for  a  first 
novel  is  typical  of  Mr.  Shaw's  fondness  for  a  kind  of 
inverted  humour.  The  Irrational  Knot  (1880)  treats  the 
hoary  problem  of  the  marriage  tie,  but  like  a  play  of 
much  later  date,  Getting  Married  (1908),  it  suffers  in  its 
greatest  need  from  the  author's  inability  to  perceive  that 
if  woman  is  more  primitive  than  man  in  "  the  sex  busi- 
ness," this  is  not  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter. 
Woman  is  both  more  primitive  and  more  sophisticated  : 
her  receptiveness  and  power  of  imitation  have  laid  her 
open  to  the  attacks  of  civilisation,  and  her  inscrutability 
is  a  result  of  the  social  order  and  its  arbitary  conventions 
to  which  she  has  yielded  more  rapidly  than  man.  An 
Unsocial  Socialist  (1883)  bears  the  credit  of  having 
interested  William  Morris  upon  its  appearance  in  a  socialist 
periodical,  but  it  carries  too  many  traces  of  the  pro- 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  327 

pagandist  in  the  first  flush  of  critical  interest  with  new 
theories ;  and  the  whole  is  exasperatingly  formless. 
Cashel  Byron's  Profession  (1882),  which  had  a  measure 
of  success  from  the  first  both  in  England  and  America, 
is  the  best  of  these  early  novels,  for  it  is  genuine  melo- 
drama and  makes  no  pretence  of  reaching  after  higher 
things.  It  is  the  only  one  of  the  novels  which  gives  any 
evidence  of  the  efficiency  which  the  author  has  carefully 
cultivated  all  his  life — the  limits  are  recognised  and  the 
accomplishment  adequate.  Efficiency,  variously  dis- 
guised, and  directed  to  different  ends,  has  been  the  simple 
creed  inspiring  Mr.  Shaw's  work  as  critic,  dramatist  and 
speaker  ;  it  is  the  ground  of  his  philosophy  and  the  hope 
of  the  Fabian  Society  which  he  has  unswervingly  sup- 
ported. As  a  dramatist  Mr.  Shaw  has,  at  least,  been 
efficient  :  his  dramas  sometimes  fail  not  through  inability 
to  fulfil  his  intent,  but  from  mistaken  intention.  The 
novels,  save  Cashel  Byron's  Profession,  are  inefficient ; 
they  do  not  fulfil  their  intention. 


§4 

At  this  stage,  before  passing  to  younger  writers  of  fiction 
or  the  novelists  who  found  themselves  a  few  years  later 
than  those  with  whom  the  earlier  portion  of  this  chapter 
has  been  concerned,  it  will  only  be  possible  to  gather  into 
a  miscellaneous  section  a  few  who  have  either  won  or 
deserve  reputation,  with  the  premise  that  no  implication 
of  relationship  is  intended  by  the  conjunction  of  names. 
In  the  case  of  several  similar  aims  or  a  like  result  may  be 
noted ;  but,  in  general,  writers  here  passed  in  rapid  survey 
have  written  either  to  please  themselves  or  a  public  which 
had  learned  to  expect  a  definite  manner  from  them,  with- 
out reference  to  any  theory  in  the  art  of  fiction,  and  with- 
out an  originality  strong  enough  definitely  to  influence 
others.  At  the  outset  it  will  be  possible  to  range  together 
a  few  romantic  and  imaginative  novelists  and  story- 
tellers. 

Romance,  in  seeking  an  escape  from  the  civilisation  of 
an  industrial  and  mechanical  world,  has  commonly  turned 
to  wild  and  untrammelled  corners  still  to  be  found 


328  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

on  the  earth  ;  and  among  writers  of  romance  who  draw 
upon  travel,   adventure  and  experience,  and  write  with 

unquestionable  gifts  of  imagination  and 
Robert  Bontine  literary  style  are  to  be  named  Mr. 
Cunninghame  Cunninghame  Graham  and  Mr.  W.  H. 

Graham,  b.  1852.       Hudson.      Mr.    Cunninghame    Graham, 

traveller,  Member  of  Parliament  and 
socialist  orator,  began  to  write  comparatively  late  in  life, 
and  it  is  surprising  that  an  author  so  finely  endowed  with 
gifts  of  style  and  language,  of  youthful  adventurousness, 
of  full-blooded  joy  in  life,  should  have  waited  so  long 
before  yielding  to  the  impulse  of  self-expression.  The 
explanation  is  to  hand  in  his  books,  and  needs  no  long 
searching.  Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham  is  first  a  man  of 
action,  a  lover  of  travel,  and,  above  all,  a  lover  of  life, 
of  the  strong,  rough  life  of  men  and  women  dwelling  on 
wild  plains,  unspoiled  by  the  mechanism  of  modern 
civilisation.  And  when  he  writes  it  is  not  for  the  sake 
of  writing,  but  to  gather  what  he  has  experienced.  "  Let 
nobody  deceive  himself,"  he  writes,  .  .  .  "  that  books  are 
spun  out  from  the  inner  consciousness.  .  .  .  All  that  we 
write  is  but  a  bringing  forth  of  something  we  have  seen 
or  heard  about."  To  read  Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham's 
sketches  and  short  stories  is  to  be  in  touch  with  a  writer 
alive  to  the  finger-tips,  a  man  who  feels  not  the  joy  of 
life  but  a  plenitude  of  gladness  in  living.  Practically  all 
his  work,  apart  from  topographical  books  and  narratives 
of  travel,  consists  of  sketches,  studies  of  character  and 
fragmentary  stories  that  are  no  more  than  sketches.  He 
writes  of  Mexico,  the  Pampas  of  South  America,  of  Spain, 
of  the  Arabs  in  North  Africa,  of  his  native  Scotland,  of 
life  in  the  untamed  and  savage  corners  of  the  world,  of 
the  weary,  wicked  life  of  old-world  cities,  and  always  he 
leaves  the  impression  of  one  who  intimately  and  as  a 
native  knows  the  lives  and  souls  of  all  the  men  and 
women  whom  he  has  seen.  Aurora  la  Cujini  (1898),  a 
realistic  sketch  of  a  bull  fight  and  a  dancing-hall  in  Seville, 
showed  his  command  of  words  and  of  a  style  that  had 
the  romantic  charm  without  the  slightly  foppish  senti- 
mentality of  Stevenson.  And,  unlike  Stevenson's,  Mr. 
Cunninghame  Graham's  realism  is  not  guess-work  by  a 
romanticist — it  is  observation  which  shrinks  from  nothing. 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  329 

Zola  might  have  described  how  the  short  sleeves  of  the 
dancer  "  slip  back  exhibiting  black  tufts  of  hair  under 
her  arms,  glued  to  her  skin  with  sweat,"  but  Stevenson 
would  have  shrunk  from  it.  Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham 
draws  characters  of  all  types  and  nations  with  a  clear  eye 
for  the  essentials  that  matter.  None  can  forget,  after 
reading  '  Beattock  for  Moffat,'  the  dying  Scotchman 
travelling  home  in  the  train,  or  the  hard-grained  and  much- 
hated  missionary  of  '  A  Convert,'  or  the  contrast  of  the 
innocent  and  unsuspecting  English  girl  and  the  courtesan 
in  '  Signalled,'  or,  in  another  sketch,  the  life-like  portrait 
of  the  disreputable  Dona  Ana  Alvarez  who  kept  an 
establishment  of  girls  "  in  a  winding  lane."  And  to  name 
these  is  to  select  only  a  few  of  the  stories,  sketches  and 
character-studies  which  appear  in  Success  (1902),  Progress 
(1905),  His  People  (1906),  and  the  series  not  very  happily 
named  Faith  (1909),  Hope  (1910)  and  Charity  (1912). 
These  collections  all  have  romance,  the  freshness  of  the 
open  air,  a  style,  vivid,  nervous,  idiomatic,  and  an  in- 
dividual everyday  philosophy  conveyed  in  brief,  pregnant, 
ironical  turns  of  speech.  Above  all  Mr.  Cunninghame 
Graham  is  the  lover  of  quaint  and  savage  life.  His 
philosophy  of  the  past  and  present  is  summed  up  in 
Success : 

"  The  Bedouin  draped  in  blue  rags,  his  sandals  on 
his  feet,  seated  upon  a  hide-bound  '  wind-drinker,'  or 
perched  upon  a  camel,  with  his  long  gun  or  spear  in 
his  hand,  retains  an  air  of  dignity,  such  as  might  grace 
a  king.  The  same  man  waiting  at  a  railway  station  for 
a  train,  becomes  a  beggar.  ...  So  does  our  progress 
make  commercial  travellers  of  us  all." 

Mr.  William  Henry  Hudson  is  another  writer  of  romances 
and  tales  founded  upon  wild  life  in  South  America,  as  well 

as  a  naturalist  and  ornithologist  who  has 
William  Henry  won  deserved  reputation  as  a  scientific 
Hudson,  b.  1862.  observer.  His  studies  as  a  naturalist  lie 

outside  the  scope  of  this  book,  but  his 
few  romances  excite  a  regret  that  he  has  not  given  him- 
self more  often  to  the  writing  of  fiction.  In  1902  he 
published  El  Ornbu,  a  collection  of  short  tales  of  adventure 
in  South  America.  Among  these  the  most  striking  is 


380  THE  NOVEL  LPART  iv 

the  eerie  and  supremely  well-written  tragedy  of  *"  Marta 
Riquelme.'  Many  years  before  this  he  wrote  The  Purple 
Land  that  England  Lost  (1885),  a  romance  of  Uruguay 
embodying  elements  of  topography  and  history.  And  in 
1904  came  the  still  finer  romance  of  wandering  and  love, 
touched  with  allegorical  significance,  Green  Mansions,  a 
narrative  of  the  journeyings  of  a  Venezuelan  on  the  upper 
reaches  of  the  Orinoco.  If  Mr.  Hudson  has  given  the 
best  of  his  time  to  the  study  of  nature  and  the  writing 
of  books  such  as  The  Naturalist  in  La  Plata  (1892),  Nature 
in  Downland  (1900)  and  A  Shepherds  Life  (1910),  he  has, 
at  least,  shown  that  he  possesses  the  gifts  of  a  romancer. 
He  has  subtlety,  tenderness,  a  knowledge  of  man  as  well 
as  of  beasts  and  birds,  a  love  of  the  open  air,  and  a  clear, 
direct,  sensitive  style.  His  South  American  stories  reveal 
not  only  insight  and  observation,  but  a  powerful  imagina- 
tion. He  has  chosen  to  serve  two  masters,  and  in  the 
twofold  service  he  has  reached  a  distinction  gained  by 
few  who  more  prudently  concentrate  their  aims. 

Among  other  writers  of  romance  whose  work,  whatever 
its  exact  chronology,  is  most  naturally  to  be  placed  within 
the  concluding  years  of  the  last  cen- 
Sir  Arthur  Thomas      tury,  six  may  be  named.     Sir  Arthur 
Quiller-Couch,  Quiller-Couch    is,    perhaps,    the    only 

b.  1863.  living  prolific  writer  of  tales  of  adven- 

ture who  has  a  wide  and  scholarly 
knowledge  of  the  literature  of  his  country.  His  anthology, 
the  Oxford  Book  of  English  Verse,  is  the  best  anthology 
ever  collected,  with  the  exception  of  Palgrave's  Golden 
Treasury.  When  he  was  an  undergraduate  at  Oxford 
the  fascination  of  Stevenson's  romanticism  had  not  yet 
caught  the  world  with  its  charm.  Treasure  Island  did 
not  come  till  1883.  But  before  he  was  fairly  launched 
on  the  world  of  letters  the  magic  of  Stevenson's  prose 
and  his  adventurous  romanticism  were  beginning  to 
exercise  their  spell,  and  Dead  Man's  Rock  (1887),  a  story 
of  the  quest  of  the  great  ruby  of  Ceylon,  has  all  the 
macabre  character  of  the  tale  that  delighted  Stevenson. 
And,  further,  Q.,  to  use  the  pen-symbol  adopted  by  the 
author,  was  by  nature  born  a  stylist.  If  any  man  could 
take  up  the  mantle  of  Stevenson  it  was  he,  and  it  was 
therefore  fitting  that  he  should  be  chosen  in  1897  to 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  881 

complete  the  unfinished  romance,  St.  Ives.  The  joy  of 
life,  the  spirit  of  adventure,  a  kindly  and  thoroughly 
happy  humour  pervade  all  Q.'s  romances,  novels  and 
historical  tales.  Among  his  pure  romances  may  be 
counted  his  first  book,  Dead  Man's  Rock,  The  Adventures 
of  Harry  Revel  (1903),  and  a  number  of  volumes  of  short 
stories.  In  the  series  of  historical  tales  are  to  be  included 
The  Splendid  Spur  (1889),  a  romance  of  the  great  Civil 
War,  with  the  scene  chiefly  laid  in  the  West  of  England, 
and  Fort  Amity  (1904),  with  its  scene  laid  in  Canada 
during  the  contest  for  that  country  between  England 
and  France. 

Among  his  more  important  books — those  that  rest 
finally  upon  the  study  of  character — are  Troy  Town  (1888), 
The  Ship  of  Stars  (1899),  The  Westcotes  (1902),  Hetty 
Wesley  (1903),  True  Tilda  (1909)  and  the  truly  delightful 
Hocken  and  Huncken  (1912).  The  story  in  Troy  Town 
resolves  itself  into  sketches,  excellent  in  their  humour 
and  truthfulness,  describing  the  gentry  and  lesser  people 
of  Troy,  or  Fowey,  in  Cornwall.  The  Ship  of  Stars  is  the 
love-story  of  a  Cornish  lad,  a  dreamer  who  becomes,  like 
many  of  the  world's  dreamers,  more  practical  than  his 
matter-of-fact  fellows — a  story  lit  with  the  poetry  of 
dreams  and  ideals.  The  Westcotes  hovers  between  the 
romance  and  the  true  novel,  and  relates  the  story  of  an 
English  girl  and  a  French  prisoner  during  the  great  wars. 
Hetty  Wesley  is  a  fine  character-study  of  Hetty,  the  sister 
of  the  evangelists  John  and  Charles  Wesley.  Misunder- 
stood at  home  she  is  sacrificed  to  the  purposes  of  her 
brothers.  In  the  form  of  the  serious  and  realistic  novel, 
based  upon  interest  in  human  character,  this  is  the  author's 
most  ambitious  book  and  his  finest  piece  of  writing.  True 
Tilda,  however,  is  hardly  a  success,  for  Q.  is  not  entirely 
at  home  in  his  environment  of  bargees,  strolling  actors 
and  town  dwellers.  But  he  reasserted  himself  with  the 
wonderfully  good  humour  of  Hocken  and  Huncken,  the 
story  of  two  old  sea  captains  and  their  chequered  court- 
ship of  the  well-favoured  and  moneyed  widow,  Mrs. 
Bosenna.  In  this  tale  he  returned  to  Troy  Town  and 
its  inhabitants,  people  whom  he  cannot  touch  without 
drawing  the  reader  to  them. 

Sir  Arthur   Quiller-Couch   has   the   gift   of  versatility. 


332  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

He  has  written  excellent  parodies,  stirring  ballads,  fine 
lyrics,  sound  criticism,  tales  of  adventure,  historical 
romances  and  novels.  In  none  of  these  many  forms  has 
he  written  anything  of  outstanding  importance  ;  but  he 
has  poetry,  romance,  humour,  a  happy  optimism,  and 
the  power  of  conveying,  even  in  the  slightest  sketch,  the 
impression  of  a  writer  imbued  with  fine  and  careful 
literary  instincts. 

The  sensational  and  popular  tales  of  Sir  Henry  Rider 
Haggard  have  less  pretensions  to  call  for  a  literary  judg- 
ment than  the  romances  of  Q.,  but  the 
Sir  Henry  Rider  author  has  style  and  a  racy  vigour  which 
Haggard,  b.  1856.  raise  his  stories  above  the  common  rout. 
Some  of  the  better  qualities  of  these 
tales  are  due  to  the  fact  that  Sir  Rider  Haggard  combined 
the  life  of  letters  and  the  life  of  affairs.  While  yet  in 
his  teens  he  went  out  to  South  Africa  as  secretary  to 
Sir  Henry  Bulwer,  Governor  of  Natal.  In  1878  he  was 
Master  of  the  High  Court  of  Transvaal.  On  his  return 
to  England  he  became  a  successful  farmer  and  writer 
of  sensational  stories.  He  has  also  written  upon  farming, 
gardening,  agricultural  conditions  in  Denmark  and  other 
countries,  Salvation  Army  labour  colonies  at  home  and 
in  America  ;  but  to  the  majority  of  readers  he  is  known 
as  the  author  of  exciting  tales  of  adventure.  None  of 
these  possesses  long-enduring  qualities  ;  but  within  their 
range  Sir  Rider  Haggard's  books  are  not  without  their 
distinctive  merits.  King  Solomon's  Mines  (1886),  a  tale 
of  wild  adventure  in  Central  Africa  in  search  of  King 
Solomon's  Ophir,  first  brought  him  fame.  Its  sequel, 
Allan  Quartermain  (1888),  is  an  equally  thrilling  tale  of 
the  discovery  of  a  hidden  nation  in  the  heart  of  the  dark 
continent.  After  this  the  author  ranged  over  many  lands, 
Holland,  Mexico,  Palestine,  Egypt,  Scandinavia ;  but 
nearly  always  in  the  same  vein,  investing  the  incredible 
or  improbable  with  an  air  of  reality.  He  is,  however,  at 
his  best  with  tales  of  peril  and  adventure  in  Africa,  and 
more  particularly  with  Cleopatra  (1889),  Maiwa's  Revenge 
(1888)  and  She  (1886).  He  has  also  not  been  unsuccessful 
in  tales  of  ordinary  life — as  in  Jess  (1887)  and  Joan  Haste 
(1895) — for  he  possesses  humour  and  a  sound  knowledge 
of  human  nature. 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  333 

The  Reverend  Sabine  Baring-Gould  may  also  be  counted 
with  the  writers  of  romances  rather  than  as  the  novelist. 
He  began  to  write  so  long  since  that  he 
Sabine  Baring-  scarcely  falls  within  the  limits  of  these 
Gould,  b.  1834.  chapters,  although  the  general  character 
of  his  work  may  be  mentioned  briefly, 
for  he  is  not  only  amazingly  prolific  and  versatile,  but  he 
still  continues  to  write  with  an  industry  and  vigour  that 
scarcely  falter.  For  over  half  a  century  he  has  been 
writing  from  different  country  rectories  upon  all  subjects 
and  with  unabated  speed.  Comparative  religion,  quaint, 
old-world  customs,  beliefs,  superstitions,  folk-lore,  topo- 
graphy, ethnology,  and  by-ways  of  history  have  been 
among  his  chief  interests.  His  first  important  book  was 
Curious  Myths  of  the  Middle  Ages  (1866-67).  This  was 
succeeded  by  The  Origin  and  Development  of  Religious 
Beliefs  (1869-70),  and  the  lengthy  and  laborious  Lives  of 
the  Saints  (1872-77)  in  fifteen  volumes.  He  is  a  hymn 
writer,  the  author  of  many  volumes  of  sermons,  guide- 
books, histories  and  novels.  Perhaps  nobody  living  among 
English  authors  has  produced  a  larger  quantity  of  printed 
matter ;  but  the  pen  of  a  ready  writer  has  been  a  snare 
set  in  the  way  of  Mr.  Baring-Gould,  for  it  cannot  be  said 
that  he  has  produced  one  book  of  individual  character  or 
distinction.  Only  a  few  from  the  large  number  of  his 
romances  can  be  named.  Mehalah  (1880),  is  sensational, 
but  it  displays  some  power  in  character-drawing  and 
imagination.  John  Herring  (1883),  his  best  character- 
study,  is  a  gloomy  and  pessimistic  tale  of  village  life  in 
Devon  and  Cornwall.  And  of  his  later  romances  the  best 
are  The  Broom  Squire  (1896)  and  Cheap  Jack  Zita  (1893). 
Mr.  Baring-Gould  for  the  most  part  depicts  rustic  and 
agricultural  life  in  the  West  of  England,  but  he  uses 
almost  any  local  setting  with  complete  indifference.  When 
he  is  at  his  best  in  John  Herring  and  one  or  two  of  the 
other  novels,  his  genuine  gift  of  characterisation,  his 
imaginative  rendering  of  scenery  and  atmosphere  cause 
regret  that  he  has  written  so  rapidly  without  due 
thought  or  care.  Mr.  Baring-Gould  is  a  born  man-of- 
letters  who  only  lacks  self-restraint,  patience  and  dis- 
tinctive ideas. 

Sir  Arthur   Conan   Doyle,   another   popular   writer   of 


334  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

romances,  is  the  grandson  of  John  Doyle,  the  caricaturist 
and  illustrator  of  Thackeray.  He  has  written  many  tales 
that  are  clever  and  ingenious ;  but  he 
Sir  Arthur  Conan  is  little  troubled  with  literary  ideal- 
Doyle,  b.  1859.  ism.  Although  he  studied  medicine  at 
Edinburgh,  and  even  practised  as  a 
physician  for  eight  or  nine  years,  he  began  to  write  early. 
His  first  books  were  insignificant ;  and  it  was  not  till  he 
introduced  his  famous  detective  character,  Sherlock 
Holmes,  in  A  Study  in  Scarlet  (1887),  that  he  won  success. 
With  other  books  in  which  the  same  acute  but  prosy 
detective  appears  the  author  set  the  vogue  of  the  detective 
tale,  and  popular  magazines  were  inundated  with  stories 
in  this  genre.  Ingenious  complications  of  crime  and  their 
certain  solution  by  the  infallible  Holmes  is  the  stuff  of 
which  is  woven  The  Sign  of  Four  (1889),  The  Adventures 
of  Sherlock  Holmes  (1891),  The  Memoirs  of  Sherlock  Holmes 
(1893),  The  Hound  of  the  Baskervilles  (1902)  and  The  Return 
of  Sherlock  Holmes  (1904).  The  author  possesses  ingenuity 
in  the  invention  of  the  mysterious,  macabre  and  horrify- 
ing, but  to  compare  his  work  with  the  writing  of  Poe, 
as  some  have  not  hesitated  to  do,  is  to  lose  all  sense  of 
proportion. 

Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle's  historical  romances  are  of 
better  literary  quality.  The  White  Company  (1890),  a 
narrative  of  the  exploits  in  France  and  Castile  of  a  com- 
pany of  English  bowmen  during  the  Hundred  Years'  War, 
is  a  well-written  and  fascinating  historical  tale  ;  and  Sir 
Nigel  (1906)  is  another  good  romance  of  the  Middle  Age. 
Rodney  Stone  (1896)  depicts  vividly  and  realistically 
prize-fighting  and  social  amenities  in  England  during  the 
days  of  the  Prince  Regent.  The  Exploits  of  Brigadier 
Gerard  (1896)  and  The  Adventures  of  Gerard  (1903)  are  a 
racy  and  vivacious  record  in  the  first  person  of  the 
experiences  of  a  gallant  but  conceited  soldier  in  Napoleon's 
Grand  Army.  The  characters  of  historical  romance  are 
rarely  more  than  puppets  ;  yet  in  these  and  other  volumes 
Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  displays  a  ready  aptitude  for 
weaving  a  good  story  of  adventure  against  a  background 
of  history. 

During  the  Boer  War  Dr.  Doyle  visited  South  Africa, 
and  returned  to  write  a  history  of  The  Great  Boer  War 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  335 

(1900)  and  a  defence  of  English  policy.  At  this  time  he 
received  a  knighthood.  Latterly  he  has  written  several 
plays  and  new  romances,  including  The  Lost  World  (1912), 
in  which  appears  the  sensational  character  of  Professor 
Challenger  who  discovers  a  territory  still  inhabited  by 
the  fearful  wild-fowl  of  the  earth's  early  ages.  This  book 
is  a  good  example  of  the  lowest  level  of  the  author's 
commercial  output,  forming  the  largest  part  of  his 
work.  With  his  historical  romances,  however,  Sir  Arthur 
Conan  Doyle  has  shown  a  real  faculty  for  producing 
good  tales  of  the  kind. 

In  fidelity  to  human  nature  and  in  style  the  Canadian 
romances  of  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  stand  on  a  different  plane. 

In  Pierre  and  His  People  (1892)  and 

Sir  Gilbert  Parker,  companion  volumes  of  tales  depict  - 

b.  1862.  ing  half-breed  and  French  Canadian 

life  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  drew  on  the 

experiences  of  his  youth,  for  he  was  born  near  Ontario  and 
learned  to  know  the  people  of  Lower  Canada  intimately. 
The  stories  collected  in  Pierre  are  related  to  each  other 
only  in  that  they  are  strung  upon  one  character,  Pierre, 
the  half-breed.  Taken  together  they  are  a  painting  of 
life  in  that  part  of  Canada  assigned  by  charter  to  the 
Hudson's  Bay  Company,  and  sketch  in  the  spirit  of 
romance,  adventure  or  sentiment  the  characters  of  Indians, 
half-breeds,  servants  of  the  company  and  experiences  of 
the  North- West  Mounted  Police.  '  A  Prairie  Vagabond,' 
the  story  of  Little  Hammer's  avenging  of  his  wife,  in  the 
exactness  and  economy  of  its  material  is  an  example  of 
the  art  of  the  short  tale.  A  curious  defect  in  these  tales 
is  the  absence  of  background.  The  arid  wastes,  the  clear 
air,  the  snows  of  the  north — these  are  not  omitted,  but 
Sir  Gilbert  Parker  is  far  from  successful  in  creating  an 
atmosphere  and  a  setting  for  his  characters.  We  can 
almost  forget  our  hypothetical  environment  as  we  read. 
Happily  this  charge  cannot  be  brought  with  equal  force 
against  the  short  stories  of  An  Adventurer  of  the  North 
(1895),  which  continue  the  records  begun  in  Pierre,  and 
The  Lane  That  Had  No  Turning  (1900),  which  contains 
some  of  his  best  work.  But  best  of  all  is  the  spirited 
and  vigorous  romance,  When  Valmond  Came  to  Pontiac 
(1895),  the  story  of  a  valet  who  had  served  in  the  Bona- 


336  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

parte  family,  was  imbued  with  their  traditions,  came  to 
Pontiac,  a  small  village  in  French  Canada,  posed  as  a 
Bonaparte,  and  died,  shot  by  the  English  soldiery,  for 
stirring  up  sedition  among  the  people.  Sir  Gilbert  Parker 
achieved  noteworthy  success  in  this  book.  The  villagers, 
their  life,  the  scenery,  the  atmosphere  are  vividly  painted, 
and  humour,  pathos  and  style  all  conduce  to  an  excellent 
story. 

Mrs.  Falchion  (1893)  is  not  so  convincing  as  the 
short  stories  or  romances.  It  is  a  study  of  some 
length  in  the  character  of  a  hard,  wire-drawn  woman. 
The  characters  are  needlessly  translated  from  point  to 
point  on  the  globe,  and  the  action  is  melodramatic.  The 
Seats  of  the  Mighty  (1896)  is  an  ambitious  but  well-knit 
and  successful  historical  romance  of  Canada  in  the  days 
of  its  conquest  by  Wolfe.  The  historical  material  has 
been  worked  up  with  scholarly  care.  In  The  Battle  of 
the  Strong  (1898)  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  deserted  Canada  with- 
out advantage  to  the  tale  ;  and  two  years  later  he  entered 
the  English  Parliament  to  the  detriment  of  his  work  as 
a  writer.  The  pursuit  of  an  active  life  has  to  some  extent 
forced  literature  aside.  Among  his  later  books,  in  which 
the  scene  is  variously  laid,  are  Donovan  Pasha  (1902), 
The  Ladder  of  Swords  (1904),  The  Weavers  (1907), 
Northern.  Lights  (1909)  and  The  Judgment  House  (1913). 
The  last  named  is  a  strikingly  dramatic  and  idealistic 
novel  treating  the  relationship  of  England  and  South 
Africa. 

Sir  Gilbert  Parker's  finest  work  is  to  be  found  in  his 
early  studies  of  French  Canadian  life,  and  chiefly  in  that 
truly  admirable  romance,  written  with  humour  and  the 
dignity  of  true  pathos,  When  V almond  Came  to  Pontiac. 
Valmond,  the  sincere  imposter,  is  a  figure  of  great  attrac- 
tiveness, Pierre,  the  half-breed,  the  Cure,  the  Avocat,  the 
Seigneur  of  Pontiac,  and  the  villagers  are  without  excep- 
tion vividly  and  convincingly  characterised.  Sir  Gilbert 
Parker  is  not  an  inventive  or  creative  writer,  but  his  style 
is  good,  he  is  conscious  of  literary  responsibility,  his 
observation  is  sure  ;  and,  if  he  belongs  to  the  secondary 
class  of  novelists,  his  French  Canadian  stories  give  him 
a  high  place  in  that  class. 

Hugh  Stowell  Scott,  who  used  for  his  pen-name,  Henry 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  337 

Seton  Merriman,  was  a  writer  of  romantic  tales  who  won 
great  popularity  and  large  sales ;  but  he  has  little  further 

claim  to   mention,    for  if   his    work 

Henry  Seton  Merriman,  never    sinks    far    it    equally    never 
1863-1903.  rises  above  a  competent  mediocrity. 

Among  his  best-known  tales  are  The 
Slave  of  the  Lamp  (1892),  The  Sowers  (1896)  and  In  Kedar's 
Tents  (1897). 

In  sharp  contrast  with  these  writers  of  romance  may  be 
placed  two  writers  of  ethical,  economic  and  problem  novels 
of  a  realistic  character.     Charles  Grant 
Grant  Allen,  Blairfindie   Allen,  who    abbreviated    his 

1848-1899.  name  on  title-pages  to  Grant  Allen,  was 

by  the  whole  influence  of  his  training  as 
a  scientific  observer  a  realist  in  fiction,  a  keen  and  a  close 
student  of  character.  Unfortunately  the  necessity  to  earn 
a  livelihood  by  the  pen  drove  him  to  write  many  novels 
of  a  kind  dictated  not  by  his  own  ideals,  but  by  the  taste 
of  the  subscriber  at  the  libraries.  In  fifteen  years  he 
published  over  thirty  novels,  and  this  rapidity  in  output 
speaks  for  itself.  They  all  bear  evidence  to  the  hard, 
keen,  brilliant  intellect  of  the  author,  and  many  of  the 
short  stories  are  admirably  told  ;  but  Grant  Allen  wrote 
fiction  by  necessity,  not  choice.  If  he  had  not  been 
compelled  by  circumstances  it  is  doubtful  if  he  would 
have  turned  aside  from  research  and  scientific  writing. 
Fortunately  for  himself  he  won  success  in  the  practice 
of  fiction  ;  but  even  his  more  ambitious  novels  have  little 
permanent  value.  The  Woman  Who  Did  (1895),  his  most 
famous  book,  was  a  sincere  and  earnest  plea  for  freer 
union  and  love  between  the  sexes  than  the  present  order 
of  society  commonly  allows  ;  and  inevitably  it  enjoyed, 
what  the  author  did  not  wish,  the  success  of  a  scandal. 
In  the  nature  of  the  case  it  was  impossible  that  The 
Woman  Who  Did  should  be  a  work  of  art.  Its  obvious 
didacticism,  the  keen  but  deplorably  narrow  vision  of 
the  author,  his  inability  to  see  far  on  either  hand,  and 
his  burning  desire  scientifically  to  cleanse  a  smirched  and 
soiled  world,  constantly  intrude  themselves  upon  the 
character-painting.  In  common  with  the  greater  part 
of  Grant  Allen's  work  in  fiction  the  book  exemplifies  his 
acute  intellectual  r>owers  and  lack  of  artistic  faculty. 


338  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Like  Grant  Allen  Mr.  Israel  Zangwill  is  a  man  of  causes 
as  well  as  of  letters.  He  is  a  Jew  of  the  Jews,  a  promoter 

of  the  Zionist  movement,  latterly  he 
Israel  Zangwill,  has  enthusiastically  advocated  woman 
b.  1864.  suffrage,  and  written  what  may  be 

described  as  large-scale  and  modern 
moralities  in  The  War  God  (1911)  and  The  Next  Religion 
(1912).  And,  like  Grant  Allen,  Gissing  and  Mr.  Arthur 
Morison  Mr.  Zangwill  was  to  be  counted  with  a  school 
of  realists  in  the  'nineties,  not  markedly  influenced  by 
French  methods.  Before  he  resigned  his  position  as  a 
master  at  the  Jews'  Free  School,  after  differences  with 
the  managers,  he  had  written  a  fantastic  tale,  The  Premier 
and  the  Painter  (1888),  in  conjunction  with  Louis  Cowen  ; 
and  it  was  therefore  natural  that  he  should  slip  into 
journalism  and  authorship.  He  won  deserved  reputation 
with  Children  of  the  Ghetto  (1892),  an  ambitious  attempt 
to  draw  in  comprehensive  outline  the  Jews  of  London, 
rich  and  poor.  Their  ideas,  habits  of  life  and  ceremonial, 
are  represented  in  close  detail  and  with  great  fullness, 
and  a  slight  thread  of  narrative  serves  to  bind  the  whole. 
Children  of  the  Ghetto  is  a  remarkable,  interesting  and 
valuable  book.  Mr.  Zangwill  broke  new  ground  with  this 
unrelentingly  realistic,  yet  sympathetic  picture  of  life 
among  his  countrymen  in  Whitechapel.  He  possessed 
knowledge  founded  upon  close  observation,  abundant 
material,  a  fine  power  of  strong  characterisation,  and, 
furthermore,  lightness  of  touch,  a  vivid  manner  and  humour 
combined  with  pathos.  Children  of  the  Ghetto  is  not,  as 
one  enthusiastic  critic  described  it,  "  Heinrich  Heine 
writing  with  the  pen  of  Charles  Dickens  " — a  startling 
image — though  the  book  undoubtedly  suggests  Dickens,  for 
Mr.  Zangwill  is  able  to  describe  sordid,  ugly  and  poverty- 
stricken  life  without  harshness.  To  Gissing  the  under- 
world was  hateful  and  dirty  without  redemption. 

Mr.  Zangwill  had  found  his  field  of  work  and  followed 
his  first  success  with  Ghetto  Tragedies  (1893),  short  stories 
of  Jewish  life  which  were  later  incorporated  in  They  That 
Walk  in  Darkness  (1899).  Jewish  also  are  the  sketches 
of  Ghetto  Comedies  (1907).  In  his  novels  Mr.  Zangwill's 
fault  is  prolixity  ;  but  his  handling  of  the  short  story  is 
often  masterly.  Dreamers  of  the  Ghetto  (1898),  though 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  339 

Jewish  in  its  content,  is  a  book  of  a  different  order,  an 
attempt,  by  an  adaptation  of  Landor's  method  of  the 
imaginary  conversation,  to  bring  to  life  great  men  of  the 
race — Spinoza,  Heine,  Ferdinand  Lasalle  and  others. 

If  the  supreme  test  of  power  in  a  novel  is  the  concurrent 
and  inevitable  development  of  incident  and  character,  then 
Mr.  Zangwill  reaches  the  top  of  his  performance  in  The 
Master  (1895),  a  non-Jewish  tale.  Matt  Strang,  the  young 
Nova  Scotian,  comes  to  England  and  dreams  and  labours 
for  art.  He  only  finds  himself  and  becomes  a  painter 
when  he  returns  to  his  commonplace  wife  and  her  vulgar 
environment,  sacrificing  himself  to  her  happiness,  and 
devoting  himself  to  his  work.  "  Removed  from  the 
sapping  cynicism  of  the  Club  conscience,  from  the  drought 
of  drawing-room  disbelief,  from  the  miasma  of  fashionable 
conversation,  from  the  confusing  cackle  of  critics  "  out 
of  his  soul  was  born  art,  "  strong,  austere,  simple."  It 
is  a  fine  novel  and  a  fine  study  of  character. 

In  The  Mantle  of  Elijah  (1901)  Mr.  Zangwill  again 
departs  from  Jewry  to  treat  the  politics  of  Palmerston's 
day  and  satirise  jingoism. 

Mr.  Zangwill  had  the  good  fortune  to  appropriate  to 
himself  a  field  of  work  in  fiction  where  the  soil  was  virgin 
and  untilled.  Work  less  comprehensive,  thorough  and 
powerful  would  not  have  been  without  its  value.  For- 
tunately he  was  happy  not  only  in  his  choice,  but  in  the 
gifts  he  brought  to  his  work.  He  is  a  prolific  and  facile, 
not  a  careless  writer  :  his  mind  is  stored  with  the  fruits 
of  observation  and  reflection  on  experience  ;  and  it  is 
the  very  wealth  of  his  material  which  leads  him  into  his 
commonest  fault,  the  overloading  of  his  narrative.  His 
most  important  book  is  Children  of  the  Ghetto.  With  this 
he  made  his  mark  and  mapped  out  his  future  course. 
But  considered  as  a  study  in  the  development  of  a  single 
character  that  very  fine  novel,  The  Master,  must  take  a 
higher  place.  The  theme,  artistic  life  and  the  career 
of  an  artist,  is  hackneyed,  but  Mr.  Zangwill's  handling 
of  the  theme  is  powerful  and  original. 

William  Edwards  Tirebuck  is  not  wholly  to  be  counted 
the  writer  of  problem  novels,  although  a  pronounced  moral 
purpose  appears  in  nearly  all  his  work,  and  in  Miss 
Grace  of  All  Souls  he  attacks  the  economic  question  of 


340  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

the  relationship  of  capital  and  labour.  Tirebuck  was 
born  in  humble  circumstances  and  early  left  school  to 

serve  as  errand  boy  or  clerk  in  a 

William  Edwards  Tire-  number  of  Liverpool  offices,  for  he 
buck,  1854-1900.  was  ever  a  rolling  stone.  His  mind 

gradually  turned  to  literature,  and 

with  the  help  of  a  friend,  who  supplied  the  money,  he 
set  up  a  "  critical  and  satirical "  paper  in  his  native 
city  without  a  vestige  of  literary  experience  or  training. 
The  result  may  be  guessed.  But  he  persevered  and  in 
time  won  the  offer  of  a  position  on  the  staff  of  the  York- 
shire Post.  At  this  time  he  published  Dorrie  (1891),  a 
picture  of  the  poorer  life  of  Liverpool,  the  only  city  he 
knew  well.  Regular  work  and  office  hours  sat  ill  with  his 
wandering  disposition,  and  after  some  years  he  retired 
from  the  Yorkshire  Post  to  live  frugally  in  a  small  cottage 
in  Scotland  and  write  tales — Sweetheart  Given  (1893),  Miss 
Grace  of  All  Souls  (1895),  The  Little  Widow  (1894) ;  a 
collection  of  short  stories,  Tales  from  the  Welsh  Hills  (1896), 
Meg  of  the  Scarlet  Foot  (1898),  The  White  Woman  (1899) 
and  the  posthumously  published  'Twixt  God  and  Mammon 
(1903). 

{£  Not  long  before  his  death  Tirebuck  conceived  the 
ambition  of  becoming  the  novelist  of  Wales.  He  left 
Scotland  to  settle  in  the  principality,  where  time  was  not 
allowed  him  fully  to  attempt  the  realisation  of  his  ideal. 
In  his  life  Tirebuck  won  little  success,  though  recognition 
was  coming  to  him  before  the  end,  and  he  received  the 
admiring  tributes  of  critics  so  far  removed  from  each 
other  as  Tolstoy  and  Andrew  Lang.  The  shortcoming 
of  all  his  work  is  the  impression  it  leaves  of  the  writer 
who  never  realised  himself  for  the  want  of  a  better  mental 
training  in  early  life.  Each  book  is  disorderly  ;  he  has 
no  art  of  construction  and  pours  into  the  tale  more  than 
is  necessary.  His  prose,  like  his  small  volume  of  verse, 
is  in  want  of  revision.  Imagination,  humour,  strength  he 
had,  but  these  gifts  he  could  only  bring  into  play  spas- 
modically. Much  of  his  work  is  disappointing  ;  yet  Dorrie, 
Meg  of  the  Scarlet  Foot  and  Miss  Grace  of  All  Souls  are 
books  far  out  of  the  common,  as  they  are  also  much  above 
the  level  of  Tirebuck' s  other  volumes. 


CHAP,  ill  NEW-COMERS  341 


§5 

In  an  age  when  printing  is  cheap  the  supply  of  prose- 
fiction  is  never  likely  to  fall  short  of  the  demand,  especially 
if  the  majority  of  readers  have  little  care  for  art  and  ask 
only  to  be  entertained  in  the  passing  hour.  The  trick  of 
stringing  together  in  a  plausible  manner  thrilling  or  laugh- 
able incidents  is  evidently  for  many  not  difficult  to  learn, 
and,  as  the  rewards  for  success  in  this  trick  are  larger  than 
the  prizes  for  good  writing,  the  number  of  trained  and 
competent  society  entertainers  tends  to  increase  yearly. 
The  commercial  novel  and  the  purely  humorous  tale  have 
their  place  in  the  social  economy  like  everythingcelse,  and 
the  purveyor  of  saleable  fiction  has  no  need  |  to  look 
askance  a«t  his  own  work,  if  his  intention  be  merely  to 
entertain  and  he  be  free  from  illusions  and  idle  preten- 
sions. His  lot  only  is  unfortunate  when  he  takes  himself 
seriously,  or  when,  again,  he  is  unable  to  decide  whether 
to  regard  himself  as  an  artist  or  a  vendor  of  marketable 
goods.  These  points  are  no  concern  of  the  reader  or  the 
critic  ;  and  it  is  proposed,  for  purposes  of  completeness, 
to  name  in  this  note  some  popular  writers  of  the  older 
generation. 

David  Christie  Murray  expressed  it  as  his  opinion  that 
the  novelist  was  a  variety  of  the  genus  entertainer,  his 

practice  agreed  thereto,  and  his 

David  Christie  Murray,  work  shows  no  reason  why  it 
1847-1907.  should  not  be  taken  upon  his 

own  valuation.  Before  becoming 

a  novelist  he  was  on  the  staff  of  various  dailies  and  served 
as  a  war-correspondent  to  The  Times.  His  first  novels 
appeared  thirty  years  before  the  time  of  his  death  well 
within  the  limits  of  the  twentieth  century,  and  the 
number  of  his  tales  is  large.  Among  his  most  popular 
books  were  A  Life's  Atonement  (1880),  the  story  of  a 
young  man  who  by  accident  is  guilty  of  a  murder  and 
thereafter  devotes  his  life  to  atoning  for  his  misdeed. 
Others  are  Bob  Martin's  Little  Girl  (1892),  Verona's  Father 
(1903),  a  sketch  of  a  rascally  father  with  two  daughters 
who  will  believe  nothing  against  him,  and  The  Brangwyn 
Mystery  (1906).  These  and  other  tales  are  inoffensive 


342  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

and  not  uninteresting,  but  they  are  without  any  literary 
merit. 

Greater  far  than  the  popularity  of  David  Christie  Murray 
has  been  the  vogue  of  Sir  Hall  Caine,  who,  since  the 
reviewers  have  failed  to  satisfy  his  expecta- 
Sir  Hall  Caine,  tions,  has  named  the  great  public  his  critic 
b.  1853.  and  judge.  At  one  time  few  writers  could 

rival  the  demand  made  for  his  books  at  the 
lending  library  ;  and,  despite  his  ugly  style,  his  sensa- 
tionalism and  his  superficial  treatment  of  character,  faults 
which  the  tyro  can  discover,  it  may  be  admitted  that  he 
deserves  some  recognition  for  a  kind  of  crude  strength 
and  forcible  dramatic  instinct.  And,  though  on  occasion 
he  does  not  disdain  the  prophet's  mantle,  he  is  free  from 
Miss  Corelli's  hysterical  ex  cathedra  dogmatism. 

Sir  Hall  Caine  was  both  unfortunate  and  fortunate  in 
the  associations  of  his  early  life.  His  birthplace,  Runcorn, 
is  hardly  fitted  to  excite  the  genius  of  romance  in  the 
most  happily  gifted  mind  ;  but  he  was  soon  removed 
to  the  Isle  of  Man,  a  place  which  supplies  the  background 
to  several  of  his  tales.  He  was  trained  as  an  architect, 
and  for  several  years  practised  his  profession  and  followed 
journalism  in  Liverpool.  Later  he  came  to  London  on 
the  invitation  of  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti,  and  lived  with 
him  for  a  short  period,  at  the  same  time  writing  for  the 
Athenceum,  Academy  and  other  literary  papers.  He 
practised  verse,  edited  an  anthology  of  sonnets,  and  in 
1881  published  his  Recollections  of  Rossetti.  When  he 
turned  to  fiction  he  almost  immediately  achieved  a 
phenomenal  popularity  with  two  sensational  romances  of 
Cumberland,  The  Shadow  of  a  Crime  (1885)  and  A  Son 
of  Hagar  (1887).  Murder,  bitter  villainy  and  base  intrigue 
play  their  several  parts  in  shaping  two  exciting  tales. 
But  his  first  story  of  the  Isle  of  Man,  his  chosen  place  of 
residence,  easily  outdistances  these  in  dramatic  thrills  and 
horrors.  In  The  Bondman  (1890)  earthquakes  and  violent 
disturbances  of  nature  conspire  to  assist  a  tale  of  blood 
and  revenge  in  the  days  of  long  ago,  when  battles  were 
fought  with  Norway.  The  Deemster  (1887),  a  story  of 
the  Isle  of  Man  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  The  Manx- 
man (1894)  are  nearer  to  everyday  reality.  The  latter 
tale,  a  variation  of  the  common  theme,  two  friends  and 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  343 

one  woman,  is  not  without  passages  of  true  characterisation 
and  tense  dramatic  situation.  The  novels  which  follow 
differ  little  from  the  earlier  save  in  theme  and  setting. 
The  Christian  (1897)  places  a  passionate  love-story  against 
a  background  of  religious  life  in  modern  London.  The 
Eternal  City  (1901)  carries  us  through  a  phantasmagoria 
of  high-pitched  scenes  of  passion  and  sentiment,  grouped 
about  the  moral  and  religious  life  of  Rome,  to  a  glimpse 
of  the  future  and  a  religion  founded  upon  the  Lord's 
Prayer.  The  Prodigal  Son  (1904)  is  a  modern  and  Icelandic 
version  of  an  old,  old  story  ;  and  The  Woman  Thou  Gavest 
Me  (1913)  is  an  elaborate  and  ingeniously  complicated 
novel  of  the  sex  problem. 

Sir  Hall  Caine's  novels  have  all  the  elements  of  excellent 
melodrama,  and  several  he  has  adapted  successfully  to  the 
stage.  He  has  imagination  and  crude  power  ;  but  nearly 
all  his  work  is  exaggerated,  sensational  or  pretentious,  and 
it  has  little  relationship  to  any  credible  conditions  of 
human  life.  His  skill  in  weaving  the  entanglements  of  a 
complicated  plot  excites  our  admiration  ;  but  this  and  a 
certain  dramatic  gift  combined  with  thoroughness  in  the 
"getting-up  "  of  his  local  colour  are  not  virtues  which  over- 
weigh  pages  of  false  sentiment,  rhetoric  and  sensationalism. 

Mr.  Frankfort  Moore  has  been  for  over  thirty  years  a 
prolific  writer  of  society  novels.  These  are  often,  as, 
for  example,  According  to  Plato  (1901) 
Frank  Frankfort  or  I  Forbid  the  Banns  (1893),  purely 
Moore,  b.  1855.  extravagant,  fantastic  or  satirical.  But 
Mr.  Moore  has  studied  life  and  manners 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  in  two  novels,  at  least,  he 
has  produced  work  of  a  better  order  than  his  average. 
These  are  The  Jessamy  Bride  (1897),  which  introduces 
Goldsmith,  Dr.  Johnson,  Burke  and  Garrick,  and  A  Nest 
of  Linnets  (1901)  in  which  the  story  of  Sheridan  and  Eliza- 
beth Linley  is  admirably  reconstructed. 

Where  the  writers  are  many  and  the  margin  of  choice 
not  wide  it  is  difficult  to  select  or  exclude ;  but  three  more 
popular  novelists  may  be  named  in  this  section  and  three 
humorous  writers. 

Mr.  E.  F.  Benson  has  disclaimed  the  book  with  which 
he  won  popularity.  Nevertheless  Dodo  (1893)  almost  set 
a  new  standard  of  light  and  easy  narrative,  built  upon 


S44  THE  NOVEL  [PART  IV 

trifling  dialogue,   intended   only  to  fill  the  hour  of  the 
idle  reader.     Among  the  author's  later  books  have  been 

The  Babe,  B.A.  (1897),  Mammon  and 
Edward  Frederick  Company  (1900),  The  Challoners  (1904) 
Benson,  b.  1867.  and  Dodo  the  Second  (1914).  Mr. 

Benson  knows  the  social  world,  he  can 
portray  its  foibles  and  thin  conventions  with  effective 
satire  ;  but  his  aims  are  not  high,  his  gift  of  charac- 
terisation is  not  strong  and  in  the  matter  of  style 
he  is  a  deplorably  careless  writer.  Mr.  Morley  Roberts 

is  an  accepted  and  long-tried  writer  of 
Morley  Boberts,  fiction,  whose  work  is  of  another  and 
b.  1857.  better  order.  An  early  knowledge  of 

Australia  has  been  of  value  to  him  in 
the  setting  of  several  of  his  tales.  The  Western  Avernus 
(1887),  King  Bitty  of  Ballarat  (1891)  and  The  Descent 
of  the  Duchess  (1900)  may  be  named  as  specimens  out 
of  the  large  number  of  novels  he  has  produced.  The 
total  bulk  of  his  work  is  large,  and  the  quality,  in 
consequence,  is  not  always  consistent.  Sometimes  Mr. 
Roberts  is  betrayed  into  writing  as  the  practised  compiler 
of  tales ;  but  he  has  also,  beyond  a  knowledge  of  his 
craft,  sincere  intention  and  a  consciousness  of  life's  larger 
implications. 

Among  the  older  humorists  who  continue  to  write  Mr. 
Thomas  Anstey  Guthrie,   who  uses  the  pen-name   "  F. 

Anstey,"  should,  for  the  excellence  of  his 
F.  Anstey,  burlesques,  extravaganzas,  parodies  and 

b.  1856.  comic  tales,  not  be  left  without  mention. 

He  has  contributed  largely  to  Punch,  and 
many  of  the  papers  which  first  appeared  there  have  since 
been  reprinted  in  book-form.  As  early  as  his  undergraduate 
days  he  published  several  short  stories  ;  his  first  book, 
Vice  Versa :  A  Lesson  for  Fathers  (1882),  enjoyed  a 
great  popularity  and  was  subsequently  dramatised.  The 
foundation  of  the  story,  an  exchange  of  personality  between 
a  schoolboy  and  his  father,  makes  no  pretence  to  be  other 
than  the  extravagant  basis  of  comic  possibilities  ;  and 
F.  Anstey 's  other  tales  belong  to  the  same  family  of 
burlesque,  farce  and  fantasy.  The  Giant's  Robe  (1884) 
has  an  element  of  the  real  in  the  remorse  of  the  young 
man  who  poses  as  the  author  of  a  comedy  sent  him  by  a 


CHAP,  ii]  NEW-COMERS  345 

friend,  but  the  chief  purpose  of  the  book  is  entertain- 
ment. Among  his  other  fantasies  are  The  Tinted 
Venus  (1885)  and  The  Brass  Bottle  (1900),  the  latter  a 
grown-up  fairy-tale  relating  the  escapades  of  a  genie  who 
escapes  from  a  brass  bottle  and  overloads  his  liberator 
with  a  series  of  astounding  and  exasperating  miracles. 
A  Fallen  Idol  (1886)  is  a  satire  upon  the  passing  phase 
of  popularity  which  esoteric  Buddhism  once  enjoyed  in 
this  country.  F.  Anstey  has  also  written  admirable  paro- 
dies of  Ibsen  and  other  notabilities  of  the  day.  In  his  own 
peculiar  field  of  work  he  stands  well  above  his  contem- 
poraries in  raciness,  vigour  and  grotesque  imagination. 

Doubtless  Mr.  Jerome  K.  Jerome  would  prefer  to  be 

regarded  as  a  serious  dramatist  who  has  a  message  to 

deliver.     But  he  is  chiefly  known 

Jerome  Klapka  to    the    many   as    the    author    of 

Jerome,  b.  1859.  Three    Men    in    a    Boat    (1889),   a 

book    which    is    humorous    without 

being  witty,  and  suffers  only  by  the  protraction  of  each 
humorous  incident.  Three  Men  on  the  Bummell  (1900) 
follows  the  same  pattern,  save  that  the  scene  is  trans- 
ferred from  the  Thames  to  travel  on  the  Continent.  The 
most  readable  of  his  other  volumes  are  his  collections  of 
light  topical  essays,  beginning  with  the  Idle  Thoughts  of 
an  Idle  Fellow  (1886)  and  continuing  with  The  Second 
Thoughts  of  an  Idle  Fellow  (1898)  and  Idle  Ideas  (1905). 
More  serious  and  ambitious  is  the  semi-autobiographical 
study  of  the  hero's  experiences  as  a  child,  a  youth,  an 
actor,  a  journalist,  contained  in  Paul  Kelver  (1902).  As 
a  serious  dramatist  and  novelist  Mr.  Jerome  is  a  little 
wanting  in  substance  :  as  a  humorist  he  is  good  without 
being  ready  or  spontaneous.  His  humour  would  often 
be  better  could  he  resist  the  temptation  to  drag  it  to  the 
length  of  its  tether. 

The  humour  of  Mr.  W.  W.  Jacobs'  sketches  and  short 
stories    of    seamen    ashore    and    afloat    is,    by    contrast, 

delightfully  easy  and  natural.  His 
William  Wymark  fertility  in  the  invention  of  absurd 
Jacobs,  b.  1863.  situations  is  surprising,  his  dialogue 

is  unforced  and  has  all  the  ring 
of  truth,  and  his  seafaring  characters,  though  their  chief 
end  is  to  support  a  ridiculous  involvement  of  circumstances, 


846  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

are  far  from  being  puppets.  He  began  to  write  compara- 
tively late,  after  many  years  of  service  in  the  savings  bank 
department  of  the  post  office  ;  but  Many  Cargoes  (1896) 
brought  him  instant  reputation,  and  three  years  later  he 
left  the  civil  service  to  embrace  authorship.  His  first 
success  he  followed  up  with  The  Skipper's  Wooing  (1897), 
Light  Freights  (1901),  The  Lady  of  the  Barge  (1902)  and 
other  books.  Few  writers  can  practise  humour  con- 
sistently with  safety  :  of  Mr.  Jacobs  it  may  be  said  that 
he  is  only  wearisome  when  he  attempts  to  write  in  other 
veins  than  the  humorous. 


§6 

SCOTCH   NOVELISTS 

In  another  chapter  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  the 
Gael  of  Scotland  has  not,  in  recent  years,  inspired  a  body 

of  literature  commensurable  with 
Robert  Louis  Steven-  the  work  of  writers  who  are 
son,  1850-1894.  grouped  about  the  Celtic  Revival 

in  Ireland.  Stevenson  and  George 
Macdonald  belong  to  a  passage  in  literary  history  which 
antedates  this  book.  And  Stevenson  was  an  essayist, 
a  wise  and  tender  moralist,  a  romancer,  a  stylist,  perhaps 
a  stylist  above  all,  believing  that  "  life  was  hard  enough 
for  poor  mortals  without  having  it  indefinitely  embittered 
for  them  by  bad  art."  With  the  Celtic  spirit  in  its  mystical 
aspects  he  showed  little  or  no  sympathy.  The  verse 
epitaph  he  composed  for  himself  breathes  no  esoteric 
spiritual  hope  ;  and  of  death  he  can  write  in  the  temper 
of  the  stoic  :  "  The  sods  cover  us,  and  the  worm  that 
never  dies,  the  conscience  sleeps  well  at  the  last ;  these 
are  the  wages  besides  what  we  receive  so  lavishly  day 
by  day."  Stevenson  was  a  Scot  of  the  Scots  ;  his  finest 
work  depicts  the  history  and  life  of  his  land  ;  he  knew 
best  the  Lowland  folk,  not  the  Gaels  of  the  Western 
Isles.  His  tales  in  Scotch  dialect  are  among  the  best 
that  have  ever  been  written  ;  but  his  sympathy  with  life 
is  the  strong  human  sympathy  of  Scott ;  the  Celtic 
twilight  never  visits  his  pages. 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  347 

With  Macdonald  it  was  otherwise,  yet  not  wholly.  He 
was  first  a  minister  of  religion,  and,  though  the  suspicion 
of  heterodoxy  compelled  him  to  resign 
George  Macdonald,  his  ministry,  he  remained  to  the  end  a 
1824-1905.  profoundly  religious  man.  His  faith  was 

not  the  austere  Calvinism  of  his  land, 
but  a  deep-founded  mysticism.  This  mystical  element 
of  his  personality  found  expression  in  Phantasies  (1858) 
and  Lilith  (1895).  It  was  not,  however,  in  these,  but 
in  his  studies  of  Scotch  life  and  character,  especially  in 
Aberdeenshire,  that  Macdonald  gave  evidence  of  his  true 
measure  as  a  writer.  The  first  of  these  was  David 
Elginbrod  (1863)  ;  it  was  followed,  among  others,  by 
Robert  Falconer  (1868),  the  best  of  his  books,  Malcolm 
(1875)  and  The  Marquis  of  Lossie  (1877).  Despite  faults 
of  clumsy  construction  and  the  intrusive  moral  purpose 
of  these  tales  they  are,  with  those  of  Stevenson,  the  best 
and  strongest  representation  of  Scotch  character  since  the 
time  of  Scott  and  Gait. 

William  Black  can  only  be  named  at  a  distance  from 

Stevenson  and  Macdonald.     In  his  day  he 

William  Black,    earned  a  reputation  beyond  his  merits,  and 

1841-1898.          he   is   now   rapidly   being   forgotten.      He 

could    be    romantic,    sentimental,    pretty, 

humorous,  without  depth  or  strength  ;    and  even  in  his 

best  book,  A  Daughter  of  Heth  (1871),  he  will  not  bear 

comparison  with  greater  delineators  of  Scotch  character. 

When  we  come  to  later  years  one  writer,  William  Sharp, 
offers  a  striking  exception  to  the  statement  that  the 
mysticism  of  the  Gael  in  Scotland  has 
Fiona  Macleod,  found  little  or  no  reflection  in  modern 
1855-1905.  literature.  The  dramatic  fantasies  of  Vistas 
(1894)  were  published  under  his  own  name, 
but  these  were  the  prelude  to  Pharais  :  A  Romance  of  the 
Isles  (1894),  The  Mountain  Lovers  (1895),  The  Sin-eater 
(1895)  and  other  volumes  of  visionary  and  mystical  tales 
written  under  the  name  of  Fiona  Macleod.  These  were 
wrought  from  "  the  heritance  of  the  Gael,"  defined  in 
Sharp's  words  as  "  the  Beauty  of  the  World,  the  Pathos 
of  Life,  the  gloom,  the  fatalism,  the  spiritual  glamour." 
A  poetic  vision,  a  consciousness  of  the  mystical  beauty 
of  the  universe,  an  extraordinary  faculty  for  absorbing 


848  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

and  recreating  Gaelic  myth  and  superstition,  are  enhanced 
by  a  singularly  beautiful  style,  which  occasionally  is 
betrayed  into  insincere  preciosity.  The  style  of  Fiona 
Macleod  is  to  be  compared  to  that  of  Pater,  Lafcadio 
Hearn,  and  one  or  two  other  writers  of  the  last  century. 
With  them  style  is  much  more  than  a  logical  and  gram- 
matical use  of  language  in  sentences  modulated  to  please 
the  ear.  Each  word  has  personality,  and  every  phrase 
an  intimate  and  psychical  relationship  in  cadence  with 
the  thought  expressed  or  picture  painted.  Sharp  pos- 
sessed a  curious  faculty  for  creating  an  atmosphere  of  the 
mystical  and  weird  ;  and  the  eerie  magic  of  his  scene 
painting  communicates  itself  not  the  less  because  we  are 
often  conscious  of  rhetorical  effort.  A  few  sentences  from 
Pharais  will  illustrate  Sharp's  descriptive  rhetoric  : 

"  The  immense  semicircle  of  the  sky  domed  sea  and 
land  with  infinity.  In  the  vast  space  the  stars  and 
planets  fulfilled  their  ordered  plan.  Star  by  star, 
planet  by  planet,  sun  by  sun,  universe  by  universe 
moved  jocund  in  the  march  of  eternal  death. 

"  Beyond  the  two  lonely  figures,  seaward,  the  moon 
swung,  green-gold  at  the  heart  with  circumambient 
flame  of  pearl." 

This  is  beautiful  in  its  degree  and  kind,  but  artificial ; 
and  Fiona  Macleod  cannot  be  read  for  long  without  an 
experience  of  satiety.  Poetry,  tenderness,  pathos,  beauty 
and  the  glamour  of  spiritual  mysticism  these  stories  pos- 
sess, but  in  substance  they  are  thin  ;  and  the  conscious- 
ness of  a  manner  deliberately  adopted  and  artificially 
sustained  is  never  wholly  obscured.  Nor  do  these  tales 
create  character  ;  the  personalities  introduced  belong  to 
an  other-worldly  realm  of  the  spiritual,  not  to  this  earth. 

Sharp  abandoned  the  world  of  drab  realities  for  a  region 
of  mystic  romance  set  in  an  environment  of  Gaelic  folk- 
lore and  myth  ;  and,  although  he  has  been 
Neil  Munro,  followed  by  lesser  imitators,  he  can  scarcely 
b.  1864.  be  said  to  have  had  a  true  successor.  The 

Celtic  Revival  has  borne  its  fruit  almost 
wholly  in  Ireland.  Nevertheless  Mr.  Neil  Munro  was 
strongly  under  the  influence  of  Celtic  romance  when  he 
wrote  his  first  volume,  The  Lost  Pibroch  (1896).  These 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  349 

stories  and  sketches  are  not  without  a  sense  of  style  and 
they  exhibit  imaginative  power.  The  style  is,  however, 
derivative,  reminiscent  alternately  of  Stevenson  and 
Fiona  Macleod  ;  and  it  often  becomes  wearisome  in  its 
ostentatious  use  of  archaic  words — "  glunch,"  "  mort- 
cloth,"  "  quaich  " — for  the  sake  of  archaism.  Mr.  Munro's 
Celtic  idylls  are  far  from  commonplace,  they  have  poetry 
and  beauty,  but  they  are  an  experiment,  a  pose,  an 
adventure  in  the  art  of  writing.  The  majority  of  his 
later  books  are  historical  romances.  Stevenson's  Kid- 
napped could  not  have  been  far  from  his  mind  when  he 
wrote  that  fine  tale,  John  Splendid  (1898),  a  story  of 
Inverary  and  the  Argyllshire  Highlands  in  1645.  The 
hero  is  a  character  of  the  same  type  as  Alan  Breck  ;  and 
the  author  uses  his  historical  and  archaeological  knowledge 
fully  with  the  ease  of  Stevenson.  Other  romances,  Gilian 
the  Dreamer  (1899),  The  Shoes  of  Fortune  (1901),  Children 
of  the  Tempest  (1903)  and  The  New  Road  (1914)  further 
illustrate  his  knowledge  of  the  people  of  the  Western 
Highlands  and  his  poetical  and  imag.  native  power. 

Mr.  Neil  Munro  is  in  the  succession  of  Stevenson ; 
other  novelists  of  Scotland  whose  work  calls  for  notice 
belong  to  the  following  in  fiction  derisively  stigmatised 
by  Henley  as  the  "  Kailyard  School  "  ;  and  as  leader  of 
the  school  stands  Sir  James  Barrie.  Scott,  Gait,  Mac- 
donald,  Stevenson,  Mr.  Munro,  are,  broadly  speaking, 
objective,  simple,  historical  ;lj  poetry,  romance,  imagina- 
tion colour  their  pictures  of  Scotch  life  and  character ; 
the  dialect  is  used  naturally,  and  it  is  not  an  end  in  itself. 
Sentimentality,  pawky  humour  and  the  1  liberal  use  of 
dialect  for  its  own  sake  are  the  ordinary!  ingredients  of 
the  kailyard  novel.  The  form  has  enjoyed  its  period  of 
short-lived  popularity,  which  is  already  onfthe  decline. 
The  sentiment  and  the  quaint  unfamiliarity  of  the  dialect 
attracted  readers  ;]  but  the  "^Kailyard  School  "  has  pro- 
duced no  work  commensurable  with  the  earlier,  the  simpler 
and  the  stronger  delineations  of  Scotch  life.  This  state- 
ment is  not  invalidated  even  if  account  be  taken  of  the 
graceful  humour,  the  tender  pathos  of  Sir  James  Barrie's 
studies  and  tales. 

Latterly  Sir  James  Barrie  has  been  better  known  as  a 
writer  for  the  stage,  but  his  work  as  a  dramatist  belongs 


350  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

to  another  chapter,  and  it  was  with  fiction  that  he  won 
fame.  He  began  by  earning  his  livelihood  as  a  journalist, 
and  the  earlier  books  are  largely  made 
Sir  James  Matthew  of  periodical  articles  and  sketches  care- 
Barrie,  b.  1860.  fully  revised  and  deftly  welded  to- 

gether. In  1883  he  was  a  leader  writer 
on  the  Nottingham  Journal,  but  in  the  following  year  he 
joined  the  staff  of  the  St.  James's  Gazette,  and  his  Auld 
Licht  Idylls,  A  Window  in  Thrums  and  My  Lady  Nicotine 
appeared  in  that  paper.  He  was  soon  writing  for  other 
periodicals  including  the  British  Weekly  and  Henley's 
National  Observer.  His  first  book,  Better  Dead,  a  short 
extravaganza,  appeared  in  1887.  It  relates  the  adven- 
tures in  London  of  a  young  Scotchman  who  joins  a  society 
which  exists  for  the  purpose  of  disencumbering  the  earth 
of  spurious  existences,  in  other  words  of  assassinating 
those  who  are  weary  of  life.  To  adopt  an  old  criticism, 
it  would  have  been  better  for  this  burlesque  had  it  been 
more  angry  or  more  witty.  As  a  piece  of  pure  jocularity 
it  grows  tiresome,  for  the  jesting  is  heavy-handed  ;  and 
Stevenson's  Suicide  Club  suggests  a  comparison  in  the 
same  genre  not  altogether  to  the  advantage  of  Sir  James 
Barrie's  early  tale.  Nor  had  he  found  himself  in  When  a 
Mans  Single  (1888),  which  is  no  more  than  a  collection 
of  episodical  sketches  tagged  together  and  given  the  form 
of  a  book  ;  although  the  dry  wit  and  humour  charac- 
teristic of  his  later  work  here  appear.  It  was,  however, 
in  the  purely  Scotch  books  that  Sir  James  Barrie  was 
most  successful :  he  has  hardly  since  surpassed  the  early 
Auld  Licht  Idylls  (1888)  and  A  Window  in  Thrums  (1889). 
They  are  both  volumes  of  detached  stories  and  sketches. 
The  quiet  humour,  subdued  realism,  quaintness  and 
sentimentality  in  dialogue  and  situation  which  characterise 
these  sketches  also  lend  all  that  is  best  to  the  later  Scotch 
tales,  The  Little  Minister  (1891),  An  Auld  Licht  Manse 
(1893),  Margaret  Ogilvy  (1896),  Sentimental  Tommy  (1896) 
and  its  continuation,  Tommy  and  Grizel  (1900). 

In  Auld  Licht  Idylls  the  author  sketched  in  a  spirit  of 
kindly  and  sympathetic  satire  the  Auld  Lichts,  one  of 
the  straitest  and  most  primitive  in  faith  and  theology  of 
the  Scotch  sects,  for  whom  "  there  were  three  degrees  of 
damnation — auld  kirk,  play-acting,  chapel."  Their  kirk 


CHAP,  n]  NEW-COMERS  351 

was  chiefly  supported  by  folk  of  the  stamp  of  the  old 
woman  whose  only  "  case  against  the  minister  was  that 
he  did  not  call  sufficiently  often  to  denounce  her  for  her 
sins,  her  pleasure  being  to  hear  him  bewailing  her  on 
his  knees  as  one  who  was  probably  past  praying  for." 
A  Window  in  Thrums  follows  the  pattern  of  its  predecessor ; 
it  is  a  collection  of  studies,  not  a  novel.  Jess,  the  old 
cripple  woman,  sits  in  a  window  and  watches  with  untir- 
ing interest  all  the  minute  goings-on  of  life  in  Thrums. 
Kirriemuir,  under  the  name  of  Thrums,  has  become  as 
well  known  on  the  map  of  literature  as  Cranford  or  Caster- 
bridge.  But  the  background  of  landscape  and  scenery  is 
often  curiously  slight.  Thrums  is  never  as  vivid  to  the 
eye  of  the  imagination  as  Mr.  Hardy's  Dorchester  in  The 
Mayor  of  Casterbridge.  Sir  James  Barrie  is  interested 
with  his  little  village  folk,  and  he  is  content  to  supply  no 
more  than  a  background  that  is  sufficiently  clear  and  definite 
in  outline  to  frame  his  characters  or  throw  them  into  relief. 
The  opening  chapter  of  Auld  Licht  Idylls  is  one  of  the  few 
exceptions  to  this  statement,  and  an  exception  which 
can  only  make  us  regret  that  the  author  has  not  more 
often  written  descriptively. 

"  The  ghostlike  hills  that  pen  in  the  glen  have  ceased 
to  echo  to  the  sharp  crack  of  the  sportsman's  gun  (so 
clear  in  the  frosty  air  as  to  be  a  warning  to  every  rabbit 
and  partridge  in  the  valley)  ;  and  only  giant  Catlaw 
shows  here  and  there  a  black  ridge,  rearing  its  head  at 
the  entrance  of  the  glen  and  struggling  ineffectually  to 
cast  off  his  shroud.  Most  wintry  sign  of  all,  I  think  as  I 
close  the  window  hastily,  is  the  open  farm  stile,  its  poles 
lying  embedded  in  the  snow  where  they  were  last  flung 
by  Waster  Lunny's  herd.  Through  the  still  air  comes 
from  a  distance  a  vibration  as  of  a  tuning-fork :  a  robin, 
perhaps,  alighting  on  the  wire  of  a  broken  fence." 

Human  nature  is,  however,  the  chief  matter  of  these 
tales  which  may  be  counted  a  reflex  of  the  sentimentalism 
underlying  the  dourness  of  the  Scotch  character.  The 
strong  vein  of  sentiment  is  probably  hidden  in  nearly  all 
Scotch  folk,  but  in  the  older  novelists  of  Scotland  it  is 
held  in  restraint.  Henry  Mackenzie,  the  Edinburgh 
novelist  of  early  date,  may  be  counted  with  the  senti- 


352  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

mentalists,  but  Mackenzie  was  almost  avowedly  a  disciple 
of  Sterne  and  no  very  distinctive  reflection  of  the  Scotch 
character.  Sir  James  Barrie's  work,  save  in  the  early 
experiments,  the  isolated  My  Lady  Nicotine  (1890)  and 
the  later  Peter  Pan  fairy  books,  is  wholly  an  outcome  of 
kindly  and  sympathetic  study  of  Scotch  country  folk. 
None  of  these  tales  reveals  any  depth  in  the  knowledge 
of  human  character  nor  any  strong  sincerity  in  touching 
upon  the  greater  themes  of  life  and  death.  Health, 
sweetness  and  an  unrivalled  charm  in  sentiment  are  not 
sufficient  to  confer  a  long  life  on  any  writing.  Something 
more  is  wanted.  Even  that  most  beautiful  study,  Mar- 
garet Ogilvy,  is  not  without  its  sentimental  lapses  of  taste, 
and  in  the  popular  Little  Minister  and  far  better  Window 
in  Thrums  there  is  an  absence  of  that  deeper  sincerity 
without  which  any  reading  of  life  must  be  thin  and  easily 
frayed  through.  The  pathos  of  these  tales  is  often  little 
more  than  an  ornamental  frill  to  the  drab  of  everyday 
reality.  Sir  James  Barrie's  sunshine  is  never  intense, 
and  the  chill  of  his  shadow  is  tempered.  Stevenson  was 
no  great  philosopher,  but  it  needs  only  to  compare  Sir 
James  Barrie's  tales  with  Stevenson's  causerie,  with  his 
later  books,  Ebb-tide  and  Weir  of  Hermiston,  to  realise 
the  great  gulf  fixed  between  the  two  writers.  Stevenson 
felt  what  Synge  knew  as  the  joy  and  reality  of  life  as  the 
author  of  A  Window  in  Thrums  has  never  felt  it. 

It  is  not  for  the  southron  to  dispute  the  use  of  dialect 
in  these  "  Kailyard  "  tales,  although  it  has  been  called 
in  question  by  critics  on  both  sides  of  the  border.  To  the 
Englishman,  who  may  be  no  judge,  it  is  not  as  convincing 
as  the  virile  and  simple  tongue  of  Scott,  Burns  and 
Stevenson,  whose  speech  rings  true  of  man  speaking  to 
man.  Sir  James  Barrie's  Scotch  often  sounds  as  tortured 
and  extraordinary  as  the  Irish  of  Miss  Jane  Barlow's 
peasantry.  If  true  use  of  dialect  be,  however,  a  virtue 
in  a  writer,  a  slight  exaggeration  is  not  a  matter  of  great 
moment,  and  Sir  James  Barrie  has  the  genius  of  more 
excellent  things — a  knowledge  true  if  not  deep  of  unsophis- 
ticated human  nature,  of  pathos  and  humour  in  common 
lives  ;  and  he  has  further  a  wit  that  comes  not  rarely 
and  always  justly.  In  these  gifts  none  of  the  "  Kailyard 
School  "  can  rival  him. 


CHAP,  ii]  NEW-COMERS  353 

John  Watson,  after  reaching  an  assured  position  as  a  popu- 
lar preacher,  turned  his  leisure  hours  to  account  by  attempt- 
ing to  create  another  Thrums  by  the  name 
Ian  Maclaren,         of  Drumtochty.    Under  the  pseudonym 
1850-1907.  "  Ian  Maclaren  "  he  wrote  two  pleasant 

and  readable,  but  not  very  convincing 
books,  Beside  the  Bonny  Brier  Bush  (1894)  and  The^Days 
of  Auld  Lang  Syne  (1895),  in  which  the  judicious^infusion 
of  sentimentality  brought  the  writer  even  greater  fame 
than  his  sermons.  These,  his  most  popular  excursions 
into  fiction,  were  followed  by  tales  written  in  a  similar 
manner. 

S.  R.  Crockett  was  another  novelist  of  the  "  Kailyard 
School,"  who,  like  "  Ian  Maclaren,"  studied  life  in  his 
early  years  from  a  manse.  But  after 
Samuel  Rutherford  the  popular  success  of  The  Stickit 
Crockett,  1860-1914.  Minister  (1893)  he  retired  from  the 
ministry  to  take  up  authorship.  He 
was  a  rapid  writer,  the  list  of  his  tales  ran  to  the 
number  of  fifty  in  a  little  over  twenty  years  of  writing, 
and  it  is  scarcely  possible  to  name  or  characterise  them. 
Cleg  Kelly  (1896)  is  one  of  the  best  of  his  representations 
of  everyday  Scotch  life.  Some  of  his  books  are  historical 
romances,  others  are  of  the  kailyard  type  ;  but  in  no  case 
is  his  work  of  a  distinctive  or  important  character. 

A  very  different  and  far  more  powerful  writer  was  George 
Douglas  Brown  who  died  too  early  to  carry  out  the  promise 
of  his  House  with  the  Green  Shutters  (1901). 
George  Douglas,       In   opposition   to   the   prevailing   senti- 
1869-1902.  mentality  of  the  "  Kailyard  School  "  he 

was  a  deliberate  and  uncompromising 
realist.  The  crudeness  of  passages  in  The  House  with  the 
Green  Shutters  is  therefore  in  part  attributable  to  its 
polemic  intention,  the  author's  hostility  to  the  popular 
sentimental  idealisation  of  Scotch  life.  Nevertheless, 
though  the  work  of  a  young,  inexperienced  and  some- 
what angry  young  man,  this  is  a  book  which,  in  its  force 
and  originality,  emerges  into  a  distinctive  position.  The 
early  death  of  "  George  Douglas  "  was  a  serious  loss  to 
Scotch  fiction. 

It  will,  further,  be  most  natural  to  speak  here  of  the 
work  of  the  two  Findlater  sisters,  who  have  done  their 

2    A 


354  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

best  writing  when  depicting  Scottish  life,  though  not 
in  the  manner  of  the  "Kailyard  School,"  to  which  they 
do  not  belong.  The  kailyard  tale  is  a 
Jane  Helen  Find-  picture  of  the  peasantry  or  the  common 
later,  b.  1866.  people ;  the  Misses  Findlater  write  of 
genteel  and  middle-class  life  in  Scottish 
town  and  village.  Their  earlier  books  have,  for  the 
most  part,  been  written  separately,  but  in  later  years 
they  have  generally  worked  in  collaboration.  Miss  Jane 
Helen  Findlater' s  first  novel,  The  Green  Graves  of  Bal- 
gozvrie  (1896),  is  neither  in  subject  or  setting  a  very 
remarkable  story.  It  relates  the  tragic  end  of  two  sisters 
dwelling  in  a  lonely  house  with  a  mother  whose  eccen- 
tricities gradually  develop  into  insanity.  A  Daughter  of 
Strife  (1897),  a  romance  of  love  and  a  tragedy  of  betrayal 
in  eighteenth-century  London,  is  better  and  more  strongly 
written.  In  skilful  construction,  in  sincerity  of  expression 
and  in  intensity  Miss  J.  H.  Findlater' s  second  novel  shows 
a  great  advance  in  power.  Admirable  for  the  same 
qualities  and  far  superior  in  character-study  is  The  Ladder 
to  the  Stars  (1904),  a  novel  which  takes  its  name  from  a 
well-known  picture  by  William  Blake.  The  character  of 
Miriam,  the  young  girl  who  comes  up  to  London  from 
the  provinces  to  seek  culture  and  pursue  literature,  is 
cleverly  drawn. 

Miss  Mary  Findlater' s  novels  are  a  little  quieter  and  less 
ambitious  in  theme,  but  not  less  successful  within  their 
sphere.    Over  the  Hills  (1897)  is  a  simple 
Mary  Findlater,       story  of  homely  Scottish  villagers.    Betty 
b.  1865.  Musgrave  (1898)  and  The  Rose  of  Joy 

(1903)  are  tales  of  upper  middle-class 
life  in  Scotland.  In  A  Narrow  Way  (1901)  the  emancipa- 
tion of  a  young  girl  from  confined  domestic  circumstances 
is  sympathetically  drawn. 

Among  the  books  written  in  collaboration  may  be 
named  in  particular  Tales  that  are  Told  (1901),  a  collection 
of  short  stories,  Crossriggs  (1908)  and  Penny  Moneypenny 
(1911),  two  cleverly  written  studies  of  Scottish  life  and 
character.  The  work  of  the  Findlater  sisters  is  not 
remarkable,  nor  does  it  present  any  distinctive  power  or 
originality  ;  but  it  has  no  faults  melodramatic  or  senti- 
mental ;  it  is  simple,  truthful,  sincere. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE   CONTEMPORARY   NOVEL 

H.  G.  Wells — Arnold  Bennett — John  Galsworthy — Eden  Phillpotts — 
'John  Trevena' — Gilbert  Cannan— E.  M.  Forster — William  de 
Morgan — The  Cockney  Dialect  Novel :  Arthur  Morrison,  Somerset 
Maugham,  Barry  Pain,  Pett  Ridge — E.  Temple  Thurston,  Hugh 
Walpole,  Compton  Mackenzie,  Oliver  Onions — Joseph  Conrad — 
F.  T.  Bullen — John  Masefield — Robert  Hichens— Maurice  Hewlett — 
Sir  Henry  Newbolt — R.  H.  Benson — 'Anthony  Hope' — W.  J.  Locke 
—Alfred  Ollivant—G.  S.  Street— Hilaire  Belloc— G.  K.  Chesterton— 
'Saki' — E.  V.  Lucas — Stephen  Gwynn — 'G.  A.  Birmingham'— 
Canon  Sheehan — James  Stephens. 

WHERE  one  was  writing  fiction  in  the  spacious  and 
leisurely  three  volume  days  a  hundred  now  dash  off  the 
eighty  thousand  words  needful  to  the  filling  out  of  the 
six  shilling  novel,  and  the  making  of  books  calls  for  no 
more  than  a  few  hours  snatched  at  random  from  a  working 
or  an  idly  busy  life.  The  impetuous  torrent  of  printed 
matter,  against  which  Goldsmith  protested  one  hundred 
and  fifty  years  since,  has  become  a  wide  and  unbanked 
river.  If  the  flood  cannot  now  be  checked,  if  the  tide  is 
broad,  aimlessly  swirling,  and  therefore,  regarded  as  a 
whole,  uninteresting,  in  its  higher  reaches  it  has  creeks 
and  side-waters  which  have  beauty  and  a  recognisable 
character.  The  vast  number  of  novels  printed  year  by 
year,  the  huge  army  of  those  engaged  in  the  work  of 
writing,  make  it  impossible  to  treat  the  latest  fiction  in 
a  satisfactory  manner.  A  few  names,  without  cavil  more 
important  than  others,  doubtless  appear  ;  but  beneath 
these  and  in  the  ranks  it  is  difficult  to  pick  out  individuals 
from  the  great  company.  In  many  of  its  paragraphs  the 
present  chapter  cannot  claim  to  be  a  complete  or  com- 
prehensive survey  of  the  more  important  among  writers 
in  the  field.  Each  reader  will  have  cause  of  complaint 
that  this  or  the  other  novelist  is  omitted  ;  and  often  his 
vexation  will  not  be  without  reason.  But  probably  the 

355 


356  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

majority  will  agree  that  novelists  included  in  this  chapter 
may  fairly  claim  their  place,  and  that,  taken  together 
with  the  chapter  on  women  novelists,  it  affords  a  fairly 
representative  survey  of  prose-fiction  as  it  is  being  written 
in  this  country  to-day. 

Despite  the  fact  that  some  part  of  modern  fiction  has 
for  us  a  note  of  novelty  and  originality,  in  that  it  answers 
more  peculiarly  to  the  thoughts  and  hopes  of  a  living 
generation  of  men,  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  twentieth 
century  has  seen  the  birth  of  a  fashion  or  development 
that  is  wholly  new.  The  older  kinds,  realism,  romance, 
fantasy,  the  psychological  study,  the  historical  tale,  the 
dialect  story,  the  provincial  sketch,  the  didactic  treatise 
are  all  here  as  they  have  been  for  any  time  in  a  hundred 
years  or  more.  They  are  dressed  out  in  modern  guise 
and  tricked  with  the  latest  turns  of  speech  ;  but  nothing 
essential  has  been  changed.  Possibly  the  collapse  of 
romance  into  enervating  subjectivism  may  be  noted  as 
a  growth  that  is  strange.  But  it  is  strange  only  in  con- 
trast with  the  method  of  the  older  writers  of  romance, 
Defoe,  Scott,  Ainsworth,  Lytton,  Marryat.  The  seed  of 
the  change  is  to  be  found  in  Stevenson,  who  took  him- 
self with  some  seriousness  as  a  psychologist  and  student 
of  the  subjective  as  well  as  a  writer  of  romance.  Ebb- 
tide and  Weir  of  Hermiston  are  indications  of  the  change. 
The  modern  romancer,  Mr.  Hewlett  or  Mr.  Conrad,  is 
incapable  of  the  objective  and  spectacular  outlook  of 
earlier  workers  in  the  field.  Defoe,  Fielding,  Smollett, 
Goldsmith  and  even  Sterne  painted  men  and  manners 
with  the  detachment  of  the  onlooker  who  is  interested 
and  concerned,  but  never  loses  sense  of  his  personal 
identity.  The  Spectator  of  the  famous  Essays  which 
inaugurated  the  eighteenth-century  novel  was  typical  of 
the  mind  of  the  period.  We  are,  however,  no  longer 
spectators  ab  extra,  but  grinders  of  axes,  teachers  of 
doctrines,  analysts  of  the  mind  and  documentary  scientists. 
The  spectacular  and  adventurous  romance  has  fallen  upon 
its  dotage  and  become  bewilderingly  garrulous  :  it  has 
no  longer  the  old  power  and  self-sufficiency.  Dickens 
introduced  the  pathetic  fallacy  into  the  romance  of  the 
London  streets  ;  and  it  has  now  attacked  a  large  part 
of  romance  writing,  even  the  professedly  historical  romance. 


CHAP,  ra]    THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  357 

The  painting  of  men  and  manners  in  great  and  moving 
scene  belongs  to  the  world's  lost  arts. 

Among  living  writers  those  who  are  to  be  classed  with 
the  realists  have  undoubtedly  produced  more  work  that 
is  likely  to  endure.  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  Mr.  George  Moore, 
Henry  James,  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett 
immediately  come  to  mind,  and  against  these,  of  writers 
to  whom  the  word  romantic  seems  applicable,  can  only 
be  placed  Mr.  Hewlett,  Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Robert 
Hichens,  in  an  equally  random  selection.  The  weight  in 
the  scales,  few  will  deny,  is  with  the  former  group.  And, 
as  is  inevitable,  the  realists  write  with  greater  detach- 
ment. Several,  Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and 
Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  are  often  as  much  proverbial  philos- 
ophers or  denunciatory  prophets  as  disinterested  students 
of  life ;  others,  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  and  Mr.  Eden  Phill- 
potts,  are  well  content  to  draw  the  things  that  are ;  and 
if  they  weave  any  doctrine  or  philosophy  into  their  tale 
it  is  with  no  instinct  of  the  proselytiser. 

To  attempt  an  estimate  of  the  ultimate  value  of  con- 
temporary work  in  fiction  would  be  an  act  of  presumptuous 
arrogance.  The  judgment  of  the  years  often  confounds  con- 
temporary '  opinionettes,'  but  not  necessarily  nor  always. 
Shakespeare  received  plaudits  critical  and  popular  in  his 
day.  The  part  has  been  preserved  to  us  ;  and  there  is  no 
reason  to  suppose  that  the  larger  part  which  has  been  lost 
was  not  more  hearty  and  ungrudging.  At  least  a  few 
of  the  writers  whom  it  seems  natural  for  a  contemporary 
to  catalogue  here  will  find  their  place  in  any  twenty-first 
century  history  of  English  literature  which  pretends  to 
minuteness  and  comprehension. 

Two  of  the  most  popular  writers  of  the  day,  born  and 
educated  in  drab  and  middle-class  surroundings,  nourished 
upon  ideas  which  satisfy  the  vast  majority  of  dwellers 
in  those  forests  of  red-brick  streets  which  enclose  like  a 
hedge  our  industrial  cities,  owe  their  first  rise  in  favour 
to  a  gift  of  imagination,  whimsical,  original,  sensational, 
carrying  them  into  regions  of  romance  and  melodrama 
as  far  removed  from  their  early  surroundings  as  may  well 
be  conceived.  The  early  "  fantasias "  of  Mr.  Arnold 
Bennett  and  the  scientific  ^romances  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells 
may  be  accounted  an  example  of  reaction  against  environ- 


858  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

ment.  And  in  their  more  serious  fictitious  writing,  in 
which  either  attempts  to  recover  and  render  faithfully 
the  scenes  of  boyhood  and  youth,  the  element  of  reaction 
is  not  absent.  Mr.  Bennct  is  far  from  unsympathetic  to 
the  narrow  life  with  interests  confined  to  the  shop  in  the 
week  and  chapel-going  on  Sundays,  but  his  retrospect  is 
not  without  the  irony  of  the  man  emancipated  from  sur- 
roundings once  his  natural  and  accepted  world.  And  Mr. 
Wells' s  young  man,  whether  Kipps  or  another,  who  climbs 
or  is  thrust  into  a  larger  world,  is  but  the  author  pictured 
under  differing  possibilities  of  experience  not  widely 
diverse  from  his  own.  In  Mr.  Wclls's  retrospective 
sketches  there  is  a  larger  vein  of  satire  than  Mr.  Bennett 
cares  to  use. 

Both  won  general  popularity  with  books  other  in 
character  to  their  serious  work.  Mr.  Bennett,  after 

imitating  the  French  realists,  turned  to 
H.  G.  Wells,  the  manufacture  of  the  commercial  novel 
b.  1866.  before  giving  himself  to  the  writing  of 

those  tales  of  the  Five  Towns  in  which 
he  held  a  field  to  himself.  In  the  case  of  Mr.  Wells  we 
cannot  in  like  manner  divide  between  what  is  and  what 
is  not  his  serious  work.  In  a  number  of  his  books  Mr. 
Bennett  makes  no  profession  to  be  other  than  a  vendor 
of  undiluted  sensationalism.  But  the  scientific  romances 
of  Mr.  Wells,  if  they  often  have  little  to  do  with  actual 
life,  are,  at  least,  more  than  frolics.  They  sometimes 
reflect  the  probable,  and  they  often  contain  good  and 
vivid  character-drawing.  They  are  not,  like  the  tales  of 
Jules  Verne,  light  entertainments  without  corroborative 
detail ;  for  Mr.  Wells  comes  with  an  equipment  of 
scientific  knowledge.  And  the  people  of  these  romances 
are  better  than  mere  puppets  upon  whom  a  tale  is  hung  ; 
they  move  quickly  and  talk  with  a  colloquial  readiness 
which  shows  them  to  be  patterned  upon  men  in  the 
streets,  lecture  rooms  and  laboratories.  For  Mr.  Wells 
has  left  no  stone  of  his  early  experience  unturned.  Every- 
thing has  gone  into  the  melting-pot  and  been  fused  into 
the  material  of  his  vivacious  yet  substantial  stories. 

Mr.  Wells  began  life  in  humble  circumstances ;  the 
environment  of  lower  middle  class  and  shop  life  was  his 
native  country.  But  he  was  possessed  of  energy,  ability 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  359 

and  enthusiasm.  At  the  Royal  College  of  Science  he 
acquired  knowledge  which  he  was  soon  to  put  to  good 
use  in  other  than  an  academic  direction.  In  1888  he 
graduated  with  a  first  class  as  a  B.Sc.  of  the  University 
of  London.  At  first,  when  thrown  upon  his  resources, 
he  earned  his  living  as  a  schoolmaster  and  a  private  coach. 
In  1893  he  began  to  make  excursions  into  journalism, 
writing  for  the  Pall  Matt  Gazette,  the  Saturday  Review  and 
Nature.  The  success  of  his  scientific  fantasy,  The  Time 
Machine  (1895),  led  him  definitely  to  abandon  teaching 
and  journalism  for  the  writing  of  romances  which  could 
entertain  the  idle  without  exciting  a  moment  of  serious 
thought,  while  others  could  read  in  them  Mr.  Wells' s 
advocacy  of  his  opinions  in  social,  political,  economic 
and  scientific  theory. 

His  work  as  a  writer  of  books  falls  into  three  divisions 
— the  scientific  romances,  the  sociological  treatises  and 
his  realistic  novels.  Mr.  Wells  was  early  a  member  of 
the  Fabian  Society,  and  imbibed  working  ideas  from  Mr. 
Sidney  Webb,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  other  members. 
But  in  time  he  found  the  tenets  of  the  sect  too  narrow  : 
he  disavowed  them  directly  and  satirised  them  in  auto- 
biographical passages  of  his  novels.  In  Anticipations 
(1901),  Mankind  in  the  Making  (1903),  A  Modern  Utopia 
(1905),  New  Worlds  for  Old  (1908)  and  An  Englishman 
Looks  at  the  World  (1914)  he  has  set  forth  his  economic 
faith  with  acuteness,  a  power  of  independent  and  original 
inquiry  and  clear-sighted  constructive  theory.  His  hope 
in  life  is  based  upon  the  things  seen  and  temporal :  the 
New  Jerusalem  of  Mr.  Wells  does  not  descend  from  heaven 
but  is  of  the  earth  earthy,  a  world  transfigured  by  an 
impossibly  wise  and  bureaucratic  regime,  a  higher  educa- 
tion on  strictly  practical  and  utilitarian  lines,  and  the 
emancipation  of  life  from  the  fetters  of  unrefreshing 
labour  by  the  continuous  development  of  mechanic 
invention.  Man  thus  set  free  will  climb  to  higher  planes 
of  health  and  beauty.  To  inquire  into  Mr.  Wells' s 
sociology,  as  we  discover  it  in  these  volumes  or  in  his 
fantastic  romance,  The  World  Set  Free  (1914),  is  here 
unnecessary,  save  in  so  far  as  it  illustrates  the  working 
of  his  mind  and  imagination.  In  one  aspect  his  visions 
and  dreams  are  those  of  an  idealist,  in  another  they  are 


360  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

commonplace  and  deficient  in  the  one  thing  needful.  He 
has  been  accused  of  possessing  the  soul  of  an  average 
mechanic  ;  and  as  an  epitome  of  his  whole  standpoint 
toward  life  the  indictment  is  not  unjustifiable.  If  he 
confesses  to  a  difficulty  in  understanding  why  a  railway 
embankment  is  ugly  and  a  natural  hillock  beautiful,  if 
he  fails  to  find  spiritual  inspiration  in  the  older  faiths  of 
men,  if  he  can  hope  complacently  for  an  age  in  which  the 
whole  population  shall  be  swallowed  in  great  cities,  the 
individual  sunk  beneath  a  tyrannous  bureaucracy,  and 
man  little  more  than  a  fly  on  the  wheels  of  relentless 
mechanism,  he  has  abandoned  so  much  that  the  most  of 
men  would  live  for  more  than  all  this,  that  we  must  hold 
him  to  have  missed  what  the  world  really  seeks. 

If,  however,  his  allurements  will  fail  to  charm  more 
than  a  tithe  of  men,  these  books,  written  in  a  popular 
manner,  are  the  serious  contributions  of  an  acute  and 
original  mind  to  the  solution  of  pressing  problems  of  the 
day  ;  and  the  insight  of  the  writer,  especially  in  destruc- 
tive criticism,  stimulates  thought. 

Before  he  addressed  his  readers  with  documents  on 
sociological  theory  Mr.  Wells  had  won  fame  with  books 
of  an  entirely  different  stamp,  books  with  which  his  name 
is  still  commonly  associated  in  the  ordinary  mind,  although 
for  years  he  has  abandoned  them  for  the  far  better 
work  contained  in  his  realistic  novels.  His  romantic  and 
sensational  tales,  based  upon  modern  scientific  theory  and 
the  development  of  mechanical  invention,  gained  him  a 
wide  popularity.  These  stories  are  distinguished  by  the 
vivacity  of  their  narrative  manner,  by  ingenuity  in  the 
conception  of  situation,  by  excellent  humour,  and  in 
several  of  the  tales — The  Invisible  Man  (1897)  is  a  good 
example — by  an  astonishingly  original  imagination. 

The  series  opened  with  The  Time  Machine  (1895),  descrip- 
tive of  the  experiences  of  a  man  who  invents  a  machine 
which  can  transport  him  at  will  into  past  or  future  time. 
This  was  followed  in  the  same  year  by  two  other  volumes, 
The  Wonderful  Visit,  in  which  an  angel  visitant  to  earth  is 
shot  by  a  vicar,  and  the  short  stories,  amusing,  grotesque, 
macabre,  of  The  Stolen  Bacillus.  Other  collections  of 
short  stories,  Tales  of  Space  and  Time  (1899),  Twelve 
Stories  and  a  Dream  (1903)  and  The  Country  of  the  Blind 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  361 

(1911)  show  the  same  versatility  of  fancy,  and  incorporate 
elements  of  serious  criticism  and  speculation.  Among 
longer  tales,  combining  in  the  same  manner  pure  fantasy 
with  scientific  knowledge,  are  The  Island  of  Dr.  Moreau 
(1896),  The  War  of  the  Worlds  (1898),  a  story  of  the 
invasion  of  the  earth  by  inhabitants  of  Mars,  When  the 
Sleeper  Wakes  (1899),  a  disheartening  picture  of  society 
in  2100  A.D.  when  men  are  enslaved  by  machinery,  The 
First  Men  in  the  Moon  (1901)  and  The  Food  of  the  Gods 
(1904). 

But  Mr.  Wells  has  never  been  a  public  entertainer  and 
nothing  more.  While  he  was  writing  the  shapeless  nar- 
rative of  When  the  Sleeper  Wakes  he  wras  trying  to  do 
better  things  in  Love  and  Mr.  Lewisham  (1900) ;  and 
four  years  earlier  in  The  Wheels  of  Chance  (1896),  the 
story  of  illumination  in  the  mind  of  a  draper's  assistant, 
he  used  his  power  of  drawing  human  character  under 
conditions  of  everyday  reality.  Love  and  Mr.  Lewisham 
emphatically  showed  Mr.  Wells' s  ability  celebrare  domestica 
facia.  It  relates  the  life-story  of  a  very  ordinary  and  by 
no  means  admirable  young  man  of  limited  education,  a 
schoolmaster  and  university  student,  who  begins  life  with 
high  ambitions  and  a  spirit  of  stern  discipline  which  are 
to  lead  him  on  the  road  to  success.  He  falls  in  love,  his 
code  of  discipline  drops  to  pieces,  he  marries  without  an 
income  and  ruins  all  his  hopes  of  advancement.  It  is  a 
depressingly  realistic  picture  of  a  raw  youth,  half-educated 
and  of  half-formed  character,  collapsing  in  the  competitive 
struggle  of  life.  The  merits  of  the  book  are  its  strong  and 
faithful  character-drawing  and  its  satiric  humour. 

Five  years  later  Mr.  Wells  took  up  again  realistic  and 
serious  fiction  with  the  longer  and  more  ambitious  Kipps 
(1905),  a  study  in  the  mind  of  a  young  draper's  assistant, 
who  unexpectedly  inherits  money  and  finds  himself  in 
surroundings  and  among  people  unfamiliar.  This  was 
followed  by  two  books  scarcely  less  good,  Tono-Bungay 
(1909)  and  Ann  Veronica  (1909).  The  former  is  again 
the  story  of  an  unfledged  boy's  contact  with  the  world 
and  his  growth  to  manhood  ;  and  incidentally  it  is  the 
story  of  the  exploitation  of  a  patent  medicine.  The  latter 
is  the  story  of  a  middle-class  girl's  emancipation.  Ann 
Veronica  aroused  an  unnecessary  outburst  of  moral 


362  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

indignation.  It  has  no  evil  tendency ;  and  is  one  of  the 
best  and  truest  tales  Mr.  Wells  has  written.  He  has  little 
success,  as  a  rule,  in  depicting  women  ;  none  at  all  in 
drawing  the  character  of  a  woman  of  grace  and  refine- 
ment ;  but  in  Ann  Veronica  he  had  a  type  fully  within 
his  cognisance,  and  he  scarcely  fails  in  any  particular  in 
drawing  the  heroine  of  his  story  and  the  personalities  of 
those  who  group  themselves  about  her. 

After  this,  unfortunately,  his  novels  sank  under  the 
weight  of  theory  and  the  indoctrination  of  the  reader  with 
the  author's  sociological  principles.  The  New  Machiavelli 
(1910)  is  a  political  and  economic  document,  reflecting 
contemporary  people  and  events  with  scarcely  a  pretence 
of  disguise.  Characterisation  is  laboured  ;  the  plot  is 
unwieldy  and  formless.  Marriage  (1912)  takes  up  the 
oldest  problem  of  the  novelist  and  dramatist  and  fails 
to  illuminate  the  vexed  question.  Mr.  Wells  breaks 
down  completely  in  his  representation  of  the  heroine, 
for  he  can  make  no  more  of  her  than  a  shop  girl  in  better 
circumstances,  though  she  is  hypothetically  the  daughter 
of  educated  parents  and  a  woman  of  culture.  And  his 
final  device  in  the  transference  of  husband  and  wife 
to  Labrador,  where  in  the  desert  they  may  again  find 
communion  of  spirit,  is  a  confession  of  inability  to  con- 
clude his  story  without  a  weak  and  clumsy  anticlimax. 
The  Passionate  Friends  (1913)  fails  again  for  a  reason 
that  limited  him  before.  He  cannot  draw  consistently 
the  woman  of  fine  feeling,  passionate  impulse  and  good 
breeding.  He  has  done  his  best  with  Lady  Mary  Justin, 
but  she  is  false  to  her  position  and  environment,  and  her 
relationship  to  husband  and  lover  is  built  upon  a  series 
of  manufactured  situations.  And,  further,  the  dramatic 
movement  of  the  tale  is  needlessly  hindered  by  long 
digressions  upon  the  economics  of  labour  in  different 
quarters  of  the  world.  These  excursions  will  be  of  interest 
to  a  few  readers,  but  their  place  is  the  set  treatise.  Mr. 
Wells  scarcely  pretends  to  bind  them  in  with  the  web  of 
his  story.  And  in  style  he  has  grown  careless.  The 
easy-going,  conversational  manner  degenerates  into  care- 
less garrulity. 

If  we  are  to  judge  Mr.  Wells  as  a  writer  of  novels  on 
everyday  life  we  shall  find  the  high-water  mark  of  his 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL 

work  in  four  books,  Love  and  Mr.  Letvisham,  Kipps,  Tono- 
Bungay  and  Ann  Veronica.  After  1909  he  allowed  the 
theory  of  his  sociological  writings,  or  other  extraneous 
matter,  to  drift  into  his  novels,  with  the  inevitable  con- 
sequence that  he  has  lost  his  earlier  lightness  of  touch, 
ease  and  resourcefulness  in  character-portrayal.  Not 
that  this  change  has  been  unconscious.  Mr.  Wells  is, 
at  least,  justified  of  his  own  principles  ;  for  the  novel  as 
a  work  of  art,  representative  of  life  and  not  of  didactic 
theory,  he  has  chosen  to  eschew.  He  claims  for  the  novel 
that  it  shall  be  discursive  and  contemptuously  negligent 
of  form  and  plot  construction,  that  it  shall  embrace  all 
ethics,  law,  politics  within  its  borders — it  is  to  be  "  the 
parade  of  morals  and  the  exchange  of  manners,  the  factory 
of  customs,  the  criticism  of  laws  and  institutions  and  of 
social  dogmas  and  ideas."  It  will  be  the  function  of  the 
novelist  not  to  teach,  but  to  "  discuss,  point  out,  plead 
and  display."  Few  will  refuse  their  assent  to  Mr.  Wells's 
contention  that  the  novel  may  be  at  free  will  discursive, 
especially  if  he  justify  his  theory  by  the  example  of 
Laurence  Sterne.  It  is  certainly  true,  to  quote  Mr.  Wells 
again,  that  "  every  novel  carries  its  own  justification  and 
its  own  condemnation  in  its  success  or  failure  to  convince 
you  that  the  thing  was  so."  All  questions  of  length  and 
the  presence  or  absence  of  plot  are  beside  the  mark  in 
ruling  a  book  as  a  novel  or  not  a  novel.  But  Mr.  Wells 
forgets  that  all  beauty  is  of  line  or  colour,  or  these  two 
in  combination.  The  colour  of  life  without  form  is  like 
a  shapeless  mist  through  which  the  warm  sunlight  uncer- 
tainly struggles  :  its  colour  perceived  and  rendered  back 
by  an  orderly  imagination  is  like  a  panorama  of  woods, 
valleys,  hills  and  cloud-mountains  seen  in  the  clear  light 
of  day — the  complete  beauty  of  the  world,  form  and 
colour  combined.  The  discursiveness  of  Mr.  Wells's  later 
novels  is  like  the  uncertain  struggling  of  light  to  pierce 
a  mist :  so  far  from  the  narrative  illuminating  theory, 
theory  obscures  narrative  and  character  ;  and  this  is  the 
abyss  in  which  all  didactic  art  is  lost. 

But  in  those  books  which  have  been  given  a  higher 
place  in  the  tale  of  his  work  Mr.  Wells  is  more  consistently 
the  artist.  His  opinions  and  prepossessions  may  not  be 
hidden  ;  they  are  not,  however,  a  burden  and  a  drag 


364  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

upon  the  action.  The  hero  of  Love  and  Mr.  Lewisham  is 
drawn  with  a  sureness  and  economy  of  line,  with  a  subtlety 
of  satire  and  humour,  with  a  skilled  handling  of  plot 
which  leave  nothing  to  be  desired.  And  Kipps,  in  which 
the  author  reveals  something  of  his  own  experience,  has 
just  that  power,  which  Mr.  Wells  names,  of  convincing 
us  that  it  must  be  so.  Tono-Bungay  only  suffers  by  com- 
parison ;  and  Ann  Veronica,  in  which  Mr.  Wells  abandons 
the  raw  youth  he  is  continually  sketching  for  the  bold 
attempt  to  portray  a  young  woman  not  dissimilarly  placed, 
is  a  complete  success  in  convincing  realism. 

Mr.  Wells  is  not  a  great  artist ;  he  has  nothing  of  the 
glow  and  fervour  of  sympathy  which  inspire  the  greater 
writer  in  his  contact  with  simple  and  impulsive  human 
beings.  Men  and  women  as  creatures  of  flesh  and  blood 
he  does  not  know  as  Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett 
know  them.  His  intellectual  acuteness  enables  him  to 
seize  the  psychology  of  individual  minds  within  a  certain 
range  ;  but  the  clearer,  the  more  generous,  the  more 
idealistic  mind  is  outside  his  knowledge  or  his  power  to 
render.  His  description  of  character  is  external,  not  inti- 
mate. He  began  as  a  writer  of  tales  in  which  the  reader's 
attention  was  to  be  caught  by  the  clever  handling  of  inci- 
dent ;  and  to  the  last  the  easy,  vivid  and  colloquial  manner 
of  narrative  counts  for  much.  The  truth  is  Mr.  Wells  is  an 
excellent  story-teller  to  the  men  of  his  generation. 

Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  with  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  is,  both  in 
England  and  America,  one  of  the  most  popular  novelists 
of  the  day.    He  is  versatile,  remarkably 
Arnold  Bennett,      prolific,  he  has  wit  and  humour,  he  is 
b.  1867.  observant    of    types,    classes    and    in- 

dividuals, he  is  gifted  with  a  power  of 
endowing  his  characters  with  an  abounding  life  in  a  degree 
which  reminds  us  of  Dickens  whom  he  has  decried  ;  yet 
his  work  contains  little  that  can  be  counted  of  even 
passing  significance  to  the  evolution  of  modern  fiction, 
for,  much  as  he  has  written  upon  the  art  of  literature, 
it  is  impossible  to  discover  principles  either  of  art  or  life 
in  his  work.  Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  Conrad,  Mr.  Masefield, 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  are  definitive  of  some  positive  attitude 
of  mind  toward  nature  and  man  :  Mr.  Bennett  chronicles 
the  Five  Towns  and  peoples  that  dreary  tract  of  England 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  365 

with  living  men  and  women  ;  he  interests  and  enter- 
tains, but  he  leaves  all  things  as  they  were  before.  The 
other  novelists  whom  we  have  named  at  random  cannot 
be  read  without  the  consciousness  that  our  mental  horizon 
has  been  modified  or  enlarged.  Mr.  Bennett  impresses 
us  with  being  a  versatile,  nervous,  extremely  perspicuous 
raconteur,  journalist,  essayist,  playwright,  in  touch  with 
the  lives  of  individual  men  and  women,  his  mind  replete 
with  novel,  striking  and  entertaining  ideas  and  turns  of 
thought,  quick  to  conceive  uncommon  situations  ;  but 
these  varied  gifts,  the  multiple  kinds  of  work  he  produces, 
are  not  knit  into  any  positive  unity  by  force  of  strong 
personality  without  which  no  writing  can  endure  beyond 
a  few  days  or  years. 

Mr.  Bennett  professes  to  have  attacked  the  outposts 
of  literature  as  an  "  apprentice  of  Flaubert  et  Cie  "  ; 
but  he  more  often  reminds  us  of  a  modern  and  different 
Dickens.  Like  Dickens  Mr.  Bennett  is  of  the  people, 
and,  like  Dickens,  he  is  only  too  ready,  for  the  sake  of 
royalties,  to  accommodate  his  writing  to  anything  the 
public  wants.  It  is  true  he  distinguishes  between  his 
"  fantasias  "  and  his  serious  work,  as  did  Grant  Allen, 
but  we  can  only  suspect  that  so  continuous  an  output 
for  which  the  author  professes  no  admiration  must 
be  detrimental  to  his  power  of  producing  better  work 
which  claims  his  faith  and  belief.  Nevertheless  he  has 
continued  to  publish  side  by  side  books  of  outstanding 
merit,  like  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  of  second-rate  character, 
like  The  Card,  and  sensational  shockers,  like  Hugo  and 
The  City  of  Pleasure.  The  most  consistent  and  least  ver- 
satile person  has  his  moods  and  phases,  but  a  deliberate 
division  of  the  imagination  by  bulkheads  is  like  the  wilful 
indulgence  in  a  dangerous  anatomical  experiment,  almost 
certain  to  cause  a  fracture  if  carried  far  enough.  In  any 
case  it  is  a  device  that  calls  for  less  admiration  than  the 
consistent  effort  to  produce  only  for  the  sake  of  the  best 
that  is  in  oneself.  To  throw  alarums  and  excursions  con- 
temptuously to  the  groundlings  is  one  thing,  to  practise 
on  different  levels  of  workmanship  by  set  hours  each  day 
is  another. 

Mr.  Bennett  was  born  in  the  pottery  district  of  Stafford- 
shire, and  his  best  work  is  built  upon  recollections  of  his 


366  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

boyhood  in  this  dreary  region.  He  spent  some  years  in  a 
lawyer's  office  before  turning  to  journalism  and  editorial 
work.  And  he  produced  in  these  early  years  his  first 
book,  A  Man  from  the  North  (1898),  writing  with  Flaubert 
and  the  De  Goncourt  brothers  in  mind.  Brevity,  good 
construction  and  an  unshrinking  rendering  of  life's  grey 
tones — these  were  his  ideals  in  his  first  book.  And  A 
Man  from  the  North  is  by  no  means  an  unsuccessful  piece 
of  writing.  In  part  the  story  of  the  young  man  from 
Bursley,  who  comes  to  London,  enters  an  office  as  a  clerk 
and  drifts  into  literary  aspirations,  is  autobiographical. 
The  reviews  were  not  wholly  complimentary,  and  the 
financial  return  was  negligible.  Mr.  Bennett  therefore 
resolved  to  give  the  subscribers  to  lending  libraries  what 
they  sought,  and  in  this  resolve  he  wrote  his  "  fantasias  " 
and  "  frolics,"  which  were  regarded  by  the  author  merely 
as  cheap  goods  tricked  out  for  popular  consumption. 
Among  these  commercial  successes  may  be  named  the 
extravagant  and  absurd  Grand  Babylon  Hotel  (1902),  The 
Loot  of  Cities  (1905),  Hugo  (1906)  and  The  City  of  Pleasure 
(1907).  Not  unlike  these,  but  better,  is  Buried  Alive 
(1908),  the  story  of  the  shy  artist  taken  for  dead  in  the 
person  of  his  valet,  his  glad  acceptance  of  the  popular 
mistake  and  burial  of  himself  in  obscure  life.  It  is  a  good 
extravaganza,  worked  up  later  into  the  play,  The  Great 
Adventure.  More  uncommon  and  original  is  The  Glimpse 
(1909),  first  written  as  a  short  story,  which  relates  the 
experience  of  a  man  who  falls  into  a  trance  and  has  a 
glimpse  of  life  beyond  death. 

But  Mr.  Bennett  holds  whatever  position  he  may  be 
accounted  to  have  in  the  world  of  letters  to-day  by  none 
of  these  books,  but  by  a  series  of  novels  in  which  he  has 
painted  realistically  the  life  of  people  in  the  Five  Towns, 
a  name  he  has  given  to  the  pottery  district  of  Stafford- 
shire. In  these  he  has  given  us  work,  serious  and  humorous, 
always  original,  deriving  from  nothing  save  observation 
of  life.  In  his  first  novel  he  had  drawn  a  Staffordshire 
lad  outside  his  native  environment.  The  first  unit  in 
his  new  series,  Anna  of  the  Five  Towns  (1902),  is  the  dreary 
story  of  a  girl  crushed  by  the  brutal  tyranny  of  a  father, 
disappointed  in  love,  yet  dutiful.  Leonora  (1903)  is  a  tale 
of  unhappy  marriage  set  in  the  same  rlrab  surroundings. 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  367 

But  better  far  than  these  is  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  (1908), 
in  which  for  the  first  time  Mr.  Bennett  succeeded  in 
reaching  large  outline  in  his  telling  of  a  story.  The 
narrative  is  almost  uniformly  grey  :  yet,  sordid  and  sad 
though  it  may  be,  it  is  a  book  to  which  we  return,  con- 
fident that  this  is  not  fiction  but  an  excerpt  from  life. 
A  draper's  shop,  a  dull  and  dingy  square  in  Bursley,  a 
third-rate  pension  in  Paris,  these  form  a  background  to 
the  life-story  of  two  women,  whom  we  follow  from  girl- 
hood to  old  age.  It  is  a  round,  unvarnished  tale,  written 
in  a  bald  style,  with  but  few  passages  of  Mr.  Bennett's 
ironical  humour.  Idealism,  colour,  light,  of  these  there  is 
hardly  a  trace ;  but  the  truthfulness  of  the  charac- 
terisation compels  our  belief.  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  was 
Mr.  Bennett's  first  notable  book.  It  was  followed  by 
two  others,  first  members  of  a  trilogy,  which  take  their 
place  only  a  little  below  it,  representative  of  the  best 
that  Mr.  Bennett  can  give  us  in  the  painting  of  the  Five 
Towns.  Clayhanger  (1910)  and  Hilda  Lessways  (1911)  are 
tales  that  cannot  be  dissociated  from  the  smoky  atmo- 
sphere of  the  potteries.  Mr.  Bennett  knows  and  loves 
this  region  in  its  grimy  squalor  and  its  blurred  beauty — 
a  region  of 

"  ragged  brickwork,  walls  finished  anyhow  with  saggars 
and  slay  ;  narrow  uneven  alleys  leading  to  higgeldy- 
piggeldy  workshops  and  kilns  ;  cottages  transformed 
into  factories  and  factories  into  cottages  .  .  .  the  reign 
of  the  slovenly  makeshift,  shameless,  filthy  and  pic- 
turesque." 

But  there  is  another  side  to  the  picture  : 

"  Bursley — tall  chimneys  and  rounded  ovens,  schools, 
the  new  scarlet  market,  the  grey  tower  of  the  old  church, 
the  high  spire  of  the  evangelical  church,  the  low  spire 
of  the  church  of  genuflexions,  and  the  crimson  chapels, 
and  rows  of  little  red  houses  with  amber  chimney-pots, 
and  the  gold  angel  of  the  blackened  Town  Hall  topping 
the  whole.  The  sedate  reddish  browns  and  reds  of  the 
composition,  all  netted  in  flowing  scarves  of  smoke, 
harmonised  exquisitely  with  the  chill  blues  of  the 
chequered  sky.  Beauty  was  achieved,  and  none  saw  it." 


368  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

It  is  in  this  atmosphere  and  against  this  background  that 
Mr.  Bennett  sets  his  best  work. 

The  three  books  last-named  embody  his  serious  inten- 
tion and  aim  as  an  artist.  Of  a  different  type  are  The 
Card  (1911)  and  its  sequel,  The  Regent  (1913).  These  are 
stories  of  the  Five  Towns,  but  reality  is  abandoned  for  an 
extravagant  and  entertaining  chronicle  of  the  surprising 
adventures  in  success  and  money-making  of  Denry,  "  the 
card,"  who  is  the  hero  of  picaresque  romance  attired  in 
modern  dress  and  venturing  on  modern  enterprises.  These 
tales,  if  of  less  value  than  Mr.  Bennett's  best,  are  not  to 
be  confused  with  his  commercial  "  frolics."  They  contain, 
mingled  with  melodrama,  elements  of  good  character- 
drawing  and  truthful  rendering  of  situation. 

It  is,  however,  by  three  books  that  Mr.  Bennett  is  to 
be  judged.  Of  these  two,  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  and  Clay- 
hanger  are  conceived  in  broader  outline  and  carried  through 
with  greater  success  than  Hilda  Lesszvays,  which  is  scarcely 
a  worthy  sequel  to  its  predecessor.  It  leaves  an  impression 
of  weariness  and  inability  to  reach  again  the  standard 
already  attained.  Mr.  Bennett's  thoroughly  good  and 
outstanding  work  is,  therefore,  to  be  counted  in  two 
volumes  and  a  third  which  does  not  attain  to  the  two 
first.  In  these  he  has  reflected  forcibly  the  life  of  a  cramped 
and  isolated  area.  His  potters,  artisans,  mechanics, 
printers,  drapers,  Bethel  ministers,  with  their  wives  and 
daughters,  live  in  dull  squares,  smoke-grimed  streets  or 
filthy  alleys,  but  within  that  range  their  experience  is  an 
experience  common  to  humanity. 

Nevertheless  something  is  wanting.  Mr.  Bennett's 
sympathies  and  his  conception  of  the  meaning  of  life 
are  not  sufficiently  removed  from  those  of  his  characters, 
who  work  in  the  shop  during  the  week  and  go  to  chapel 
with  unction  on  Sunday.  He  knows  them  because  he  is 
of  them  :  but  he  can  never  place  himself  at  a  distance 
in  order  to  see  the  meaning  of  their  lives.  Nor  does  he 
conceive  life  with  any  large  background.  The  difference 
will  be  apparent  if  we  contrast  Mr.  Bennett  with  Mr. 
Thomas  Hardy.  Mr.  Hardy  is  both  of  his  peasantry 
and  not  of  them  ;  and,  further,  he  sees  that  beyond  the 
life  of  the  individual  there  is  a  something  that  is  greater 
than  he.  In  Mr.  Bennett's  tales  there  is  nothing  of  this  : 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  869 

his  vision  is  the  sharply-defined  and  concrete  view  of  the 
chapel,  but  without  its  dogmas.  And,  consequently,  his 
picture  of  life,  wonderfully  true  as  it  seems,  is  only  true 
within  limitations  :  poetry  and  idealism  are  almost  absent 
(though  not  wholly,  for  of  these  there  is  a  trace  in  Clay- 
hanger}.  The  concepts  of  the  shop  and  the  desk  still 
limit  Mr.  Bennett  and  Mr.  Wells,  and  most  in  the  hour 
of  their  emancipation. 

Mr.  Galsworthy  is  a  realistic  writer  whose  method  and 
manner  is  set  worlds  apart  from  that  of  Mr.  Bennett 
and  Mr.  Wells.  Whether  as  a  novelist 
John  Galsworthy,  or  dramatist  we  recognise  in  him  the 
b.  1867.  same  judicial  temper,  the  same  close 

observation  which  allows  no  detail  to 
pass,  the  same  impartial  weighing  of  evidence,  the  same 
acerbity  mingled  with  strong  moral  intensity,  the  same 
passion  for  justice  and  righteousness.  Social  and  economic 
problems  govern  his  drama ;  they  are  the  stuff  from 
which  he  extracts  fiction.  In  an  age  when  the  novel  had 
not  the  advantages  of  the  platform,  pulpit  and  treatise 
Mr.  Galsworthy  would  not  have  written  fiction  ;  for  he 
is  not  in  love  with  life  first  of  all.  He  does  not  feel  and 
then  try  to  know  :  he  strives  to  come  into  contact  with 
humanity  by  learning  to  know  about  it.  As  an  American 
writer  has  admirably  said,  he  puts  "  ethics  and  sociology, 
manners  and  customs,  mankind  in  the  aggregate,  over- 
whelmingly ahead  of  the  individual."  Cold  ratiocination 
is  continually  defeating  the  artist  in  Mr.  Galsworthy.  • 

Despite  the  narrowness  of  his  intellectual  and  emotional 
sympathies  he  has,  however,  won  general  recognition,  both 
in  England  and  America,  as"  the  protagonist  of  a  new 
drama  and  fiction.  He  made  his  appearance  as  a  novelist 
long  before  he  attempted  writing  for  the  stage  ;  for  he 
published  four  volumes  of  fiction  under  the  pseudonym 
John  Sinjohn  before  printing  his  own  name  on  the  title- 
page.  None  of  these  is  worthy  of  any  special  mention. 
Two  are  collections  of  short  tales  ;  and  Villa  Rubein  (1900), 
the  second  of  the  longer  essays  in  fiction,  is  a  story,  not 
at  all  remarkable,  of  a  painter  who  arouses  opposition 
from  the  family  of  the  woman  he  loves  because  he  is 
poor  and  holds  unconventional  opinions.  If  the  book 
in  itself  is  not  noteworthy,  it  is  of  interest  in  that  it  con.- 
2  B 


370  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

tains  the  seed  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  later  work,  for  it  is  a 
study  of  conflict  between  a  man  of  independent  and  original 
mind  and  the  canons  of  the  social  code.  It  was,  however, 
with  the  publication  of  The  Island  Pharisees  (1904)  four 
years  later,  that  he  assumed  his  later  manner  and  de- 
finitely began  to  handle  his  one  theme,  the  injustice,  the 
folly  of  social  inequality  and  exclusiveness.  On  this 
foundation  he  has  continued  to  write  since  both  in  fiction 
and  drama.  In  The  Island  Pharisees  he  delivered  the 
truth  that  was  in  him.  He  has  done  little  since  save 
amplify,  expand  and  comment.  The  world  is  too  large, 
its  interests  too  diversified,  its  problems  too  complex 
and  interwoven  to  permit  of  being  truthfully  painted 
upon  a  canvas  so  narrow  as  Mr.  Galsworthy  chooses. 
The  intention  is  so  ofovious  that  we  suspect  the  author 
of  seeing  only  the  dusty  yard,  unmindful  of  the  green 
slopes  and  wide  horizons  over  the  wall.  The  social 
economy  looms  before  Mr.  Galsworthy's  gaze  like  an  over- 
hanging cliff  ;  he  forgets  that  it  is  only  a  tithe  of  the  real 
meaning  and  content  of  life  to  the  great  majority,  who 
are  but  rarely  conscious  of  its  presence.  To  most  eyes 
its  proportions  are  those  of  the  mole  hill,  not  the  middle 
wall  of  division. 

The  Island  Pharisees,  the  first  book  entirely  charac- 
teristic of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  temperament  and  reading  of 
life,  has  few  pretensions  as  a  work  of  art.  It  presents  in 
a  series  of  pictures  the  disillusionment  of  a  man  who  is 
brought  into  contact  with  differing  grades  of  social  life, 
to  meet  in  each  with  the  same  shams  and  false  standards. 
The  scenes  and  chapters  have  so  slight  a  connection  with 
each  other  that  the  whole  resolves  itself  into  little  more 
than  a  rambling  story  with  a  moral.  Only  two  characters 
are  seen  with  any  clearness,  Shelton,  the  questioning  and 
disillusioned  hero,  and  Louis  Ferrand,  the  vagabond. 
The  other  characters  are  withdrawn  into  a  misty  back- 
ground, and  used  to  illustrate  the  follies  of  the  social 
economy.  A  large  part  of  the  book  would  have  been 
more  effective  had  Mr.  Galsworthy  thrown  it  into  the 
form  of  a  direct  treatise  upon  social  evils. 

Far  larger  and  more  elaborate  in  conception  is  The  Man 
of  Property  (1906).  In  the  text  of  the  book  Mr.  Gals- 
worthy remarks  ironically  upon  the  anomaly  of  the  novel 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  371 

without  a  plot ;  but  he  has  certainly  taken  to  heart  his 
failure  in  The  Island  Pharisees  and  learned,  in  consequence, 
several  lessons.  Satire  in  shapeless  prose  narrative  is 
abandoned  for  a  long,  intricate,  but  well-constructed 
chronicle  of  the  rich  middle-class  family  of  the  Forsytes. 
Scarcely  a  figure  outside  the  Forsyte  family  in  all  its 
ramifications  is  allowed  to  intrude  upon  the  narrative 
with  the  exception  of  Bosinney,  the  architect,  who  is 
engaged  to  one  of  the  Forsyte  girls  and  used  to  throw 
into  high  relief  her  family's  smug  and  complacent  respect- 
ability. The  Forsyte  family  is  large,  the  complications  of 
their  relationships  are  not  always  easy  to  follow  ;  but  in 
this  book  Mr.  Galsworthy  began  definitely  to  show  that 
faculty  so  distinctive  of  all  his  later  work — a  remarkable 
economy  in  narrative  and  dialogue,  combined  with  the 
power  to  give  an  impression  of  the  literal  rendering  of  life 
without  omission.  He  never  writes  with  brilliance,  he 
has  no  passion  for  ensnaring  with  aphorism  or  phrase, 
his  highest  light  is  a  subdued  grey,  he  paints  the  meaning- 
less monotony  of  life  upon  every  page,  he  is  not  in  love 
with  individual  men  and  women,  his  humour  is  slight 
and  sardonic,  but  he  has  a  concentrated  intensity,  some- 
times one-sided,  rarely  exaggerated,  which  clearly  marks 
him  off  from  other  writers  of  the  day.  The  Man  of 
Property  is  a  large  book,  but  it  is  closely  condensed  ;  the 
story  has  few  loose  strands,  no  needless  chapters.  Mr. 
Galsworthy  simply  uses  the  Forsyte  family  to  represent 
in  type  the  smug  and  well-to-do  part  of  the  English  middle 
class,  and  Soames  Forsyte  is  the  pattern  of  their  moneyed 
respectability.  The  fault  of  this,  as  of  every  work  to 
which  Mr.  Galsworthy  sets  his  hand,  is  not  so  much  the 
moral  intention  as  the  harshly-defined  preconception  with 
which  the  author  embarks  upon  his  narrative.  The  faults 
of  the  social  economy  are  many,  but  they  are  not  a  con- 
tinual and  unavoidable  obsession  upon  individual  lives. 
The  truth  of  each  life  is  something  unaffected  by  the  social 
economy  ;  and  it  is  the  function  of  the  writer  and  the 
poet  to  know  and  reveal  this  inner  truth.  But  Mr.  Gals- 
worthy rarely  sees  men  and  women  save  through  the  veil 
of  a  social  economy,  and  therefore  his  vision  is  continually 
distorted. 

The  Country  House  (190?)  has  probably  been  the  most 


372  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

popular  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  tales.  It  is  slighter  than 
The  Man  of  Property,  less  subtle  and  intricate,  and  there- 
fore easier  to  read.  The  insincerity  of  life  in  an  English 
country  house,  its  spirit  of  landlordism,  its  acceptance  of 
established  traditions  and  its  entire  satisfaction  with 
things  as  they  are  form  the  background  of  satire  in  this 
book.  In  his  rendering  of  the  atmosphere  of  an  average 
country  home  Mr.  Galsworthy  is  wonderfully  successful ; 
and  in  condensation  and  intensity  the  tale  compares  well 
with  its  predecessor.  The  Country  House  and  Fraternity 
(1909)  are  the  complement  of  each  other  ;  the  one  a  picture 
of  life  in  the  country,  the  other  a  representation  of  upper 
middle  class  and  professional  life  in  London  ;  and  the 
latter  is  more  intimately  concerned  with  social  questions. 
In  the  two  preceding  novels  the  old  theme  of  the  incom- 
patible marriage-tie  is  combined  with  satire  upon  British 
prejudices  :  in  Fraternity  the  husband  discovers  that, 
cramped  by  the  narrow  ideas  of  the  world,  he  cannot 
act  the  kindly  brother  to  a  poor  and  wretched  artist's 
model  without  arousing  suspicion  and  ill-thinking.  The 
rich  and  the  poor  are  grouped  and  contrasted,  and  Mr. 
Galsworthy's  lesson  is  the  evil  of  a  society  so  ordered 
that  the  true  brotherhood  of  man  is  impossible  till  we 
transgress  its  canons  and  judgments.  Of  this  book  it 
may  be  said  that  in  brevity,  concentration  of  interest 
and  artistic  shapeliness  it  is  his  best  piece  of  work. 

In  The  Patrician  (1911)  Mr.  Galsworthy  breaks  new 
ground,  and  with  indifferent  success.  His  picture  of  the 
Caradocs,  an  aristocratic  English  family  and  their  relations, 
is  wanting  in  the  verisimilitude  of  his  chronicle  of  the 
Forsytes  ;  and  we  suspect,  in  reading,  that  Mr.  Gals- 
worthy writes  at  second  hand  or  from  supposition,  not 
with  knowledge.  The  narrative  fails  to  hold,  the  characters 
are  but  faintly  impressed  upon  the  imagination.  The 
unkind  criticism  that  the  book  might  have  been  written 
by  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  is  hardly  true  ;  for  Mrs.  Ward's 
sympathies  would  obviously  be  on  the  side  of  that  social 
opinion  which  prevents  the  union  with  another  man  of 
a  woman  who  has  ceased  to  live  with  her  husband.  Mr. 
Galsworthy  leaves  the  two  resigned  to  the  tragedy  of 
inoffensive  acquiescence,  but  he  does  not  accept  the 
situation.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  unjust  to  say  that 


CHAP,  ra]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  373 

characterisation  is  weaker  and  more  vacillating  than  is 
the  case  with  Mrs.  Ward  at  her  best :  Mr.  Galsworthy 
is  less  at  home  in  his  environment  than  Mrs.  Ward  would 
have  been.  In  workmanship  and  force  this  book  represents 
a  backsliding.  And  The  Dark  Flower  (1913)  is  an  aberra- 
tion in  the  work  of  Mr.  Galsworthy  as  unfortunate  as 
Le  Lys  Rouge  in  the  work  of  M.  Anatole  France.  The 
three  irregular  love  adventures  of  Mark  Lennan  are  wholly 
unconvincing,  because  from  the  outset  Mr.  Galsworthy 
failed  to  conceive  the  character  of  his  hero.  These  three 
sketches  of  passion,  for  The  Dark  Flower  is  no  novel,  are 
hung  in  vacuo  ;  and  long  before  the  close  the  reader  has 
lost  interest  in  the  fate  of  any  of  the  actors  save  the 
injured  wife  of  the  middle-aged  and  rather  ridiculous 
sculptor,  who  is  the  protagonist  of  the  story. 

Little  can  be  added  here  as  a  general  commentary 
upon  Mr.  Galsworthy's  achievement  as  a  novelist,  which 
would  not  involve  the  repetition  of  observations  more 
naturally  in  their  place  in  an  estimate  of  his  work  as  a 
dramatist ;  for  as  a  playwright  he  has  been  able  to  express 
himself  more  fully  and  with  a  greater  measure  of  artistry. 
Mr.  Galsworthy  was,  in  former  years,  a  barrister,  and  the 
judicial  temper  is  the  strongest  characteristic  of  his  genius. 
If  he  is  also  a  pleader  of  causes,  and  a  pleader  who  rises  to 
passionate  exhortation  and  denunciation,  his  passion  is 
wholly  of  the  intellect.  He  has  considered  the  constitution 
of  modern  society  and  seen  that  it  is  bad.  In  the  plays 
and  the  novels  his  voice  is  ceaselessly  raised  against  the 
great  curse  laid  upon  man  as  a  social  being,  that  inequality 
of  classes  which  leads  to  the  establishment  of  one  law 
for  the  rich  and  another  for  the  poor.  But  it  is  ever  of 
man  that  Mr.  Galsworthy  thinks  and  not  of  men.  Men 
and  women  individually,  and  apart  from  the  greater  whole 
they  typify,  are  not  bone  of  his  bone  and  flesh  of  his  flesh. 
The  cold  impartiality,  the  judicially  analytic  temper  of 
Mr.  Galsworthy  hinder  his  best  efforts  to  come  near  to 
his  fellows  as  a  man  with  men.  It  is  a  curious  irony  of 
circumstance  that  the  writer,  who  of  all  living  English 
novelists  is  most  stirred  to  moral  indignation  by  the 
pain  and  suffering  of  mankind,  should  also  as  a  writer 
be  so  patently  lacking  in  the  poetry  of  a  warmer  human 
passion.  His  novels  and  the  collected  sketches  of  A  Com- 


374  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

rnentary  (1908)  and  A  Motley  (1910)  are  exemplifications 
of  the  author's  gift  of  analytic  insight,  of  his  skill  in 
rejecting  all  that  is  irrelevant,  and  retaining  all  that  is 
essential,  to  creating  that  hard  and  brilliant  light  in  which 
he  sees  the  world ;  and  they  are,  further,  a  confession  of 
his  inability  to  introduce  those  warmer  tones  which  are 
also  a  part  of  life.  The  mind  of  Mr.  Galsworthy  is  that  of 
the  judicial  summer-up  of  cases,  not  that  of  the  poet 
and  imaginative  artist. 

The  three  writers  named  above  describe  man  as  he 
lives   in   the   towns,    in   contact   with   the   industrialism, 

the  political  agitation,  the  curious 
Eden  Pkillpotts,  searchings  of  the  age.  The  statement 

b.  1862.  calls  for  some  qualification  ;    for  Mr. 

Bennett  is  a  chronicler  of  provincial 
life  in  a  small  area  ;  but  his  people  belong  to  the  street 
and  the  factory,  not  to  the  soil.  It  was  inevitable,  how- 
ever, that  Mr.  Hardy's  great  series  of  Wessex  novels 
should  suggest  to  others  the  potentialities  of  the  tale  of 
agricultural  life  limited  to  a  few  square  miles.  Many 
regional  novels  have  been  published  latterly,  but  the  West 
Country  holds  its  own,  and  Mr.  Eden  Phillpotts  and  Mr. 
John  Trevena,  though  their  work  is  deplorably  unequal, 
when  writing  at  their  best  come  nearer  than  any  others 
to  the  supreme  greatness  of  Mr.  Hardy.  When  a  young 
man  Mr.  Eden  Phillpotts  was  for  a  number  of  years 
a  clerk  in  an  insurance  office ;  before  he  definitely 
turned  to  authorship  he  essayed  the  stage,  only  to  dis- 
cover himself  unfitted  for  the  actor's  profession.  After 
writing  several  earlier  tales  with  indifferent  success  he 
gained  a  reputation  with  two  books,  Lying  Prophets  (1897) 
and  Children  of  the  Mist  (1899).  In  the  second  he  adopted 
for  the  background  of  his  narrative  Dartmoor  ;  and  for 
fourteen  or  fifteen  years  he  produced  annually  his 
novel  of  the  moor,  gradually  evolving  a  regular  and 
stereotyped  mould  for  shaping  each  book.  The  volume 
begins  with  its  introductory  description  of  moorland, 
and  each  division  of  the  tale  is  clearly  marked  by  another 
descriptive  passage,  followed  again  by  a  standard  length 
of  narrative.  Each  year  he  learned  to  adhere  more  closely 
to  his  pattern,  until  the  reader  could  safely  predict  the 
development  of  the  plot. 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  375 

Mr.  Phillpotts  has  taken  himself  with  some  seriousness 
as  an  artist  and  painter  of  moorland  life.  The  style, 
the  method  and  the  size  of  his  books  has  been  dictated 
by  an  ambition  to  write  strongly,  sincerely  and  thought- 
fully. The  model,  and  it  could  hardly  be  otherwise,  has 
been  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy.  But  Mr.  Phillpotts'  reach  comes 
short  of  his  intention.  The  greatness  of  the  Wessex 
novels,  despite  their  stiffness  and  occasional  ponderosity, 
is  the  universal  implication  carried  by  a  tale  of  narrow 
life.  Destiny,  all-powerful,  heedless,  impersonal,  governs 
the  little  ways  of  men,  who  act  in  the  belief  that  they 
move  freely  while  about  them  for  ever  is  earth  with  her 
bars.  And  Mr.  Hardy  gains  his  grand  and  impressive 
effect  because  his  mind  is  naive  and  simple.  His  range 
is  not  wide.  Like  the  child,  however,  he  feels  intensely  ; 
his  insight  is  clearer  and  deeper  than  that  of  most  men. 
Mr.  Phillpotts'  mind  is  complex,  his  ideas  sophisticated, 
he  is  sensitive  to  the  newest  philosophy  of  life  and  morals  ; 
and,  therefore,  he  is  a  far  lesser  artist  than  Mr.  Hardy. 
In  nearly  all  his  novels  we  are  conscious  of  strain — the 
intention  is  unfulfilled.  There  is  a  wide  gulf  fixed  between 
the  book  as  he  designed  it  and  the  completed  work.  In 
the  Wessex  novels  the  composition  is  equivalent  to  the 
original  inspiration. 

In  the  case  of  a  writer  who  keeps  so  closely  to  his  desk 
as  Mr.  Phillpotts  it  would  be  impossible  to  give  even  a 
meagre  sketch  of  his  many  books.  Nearly  all  his  novels 
have  for  their  background  the  Dartmoor  hills  ;  the  tale 
is  invariably  founded  upon  the  primitive  passions  as  they 
express  themselves  in  action  in  obscure  and  homespun 
lives ;  the  theme  is  varied  but  little — two  men  love  one 
woman,  one  woman  loves  two  men,  one  or  the  other  is 
the  base  of  many  of  his  plots. 

Lying  Prophets  was  approved  by  one  reviewer  as  the 
strongest  thing  of  its  kind  since  Esther  Waters.  The  scene 
is  laid  in  Cornwall.  Joan  Tregenza,  daughter  of  Michael, 
a  religious  fanatic,  is  seduced  by  Barron,  an  artist,  who 
comes  to  stay  in  the  village  for  the  sake  of  his  health. 
For  him  the  phase  is  no  more  than  one  of  his  many  moods  ; 
she  finds  herself  deserted  with  the  prospect  of  becoming 
a  mother.  For  long  the  post  brings  no  word  from  her 
lover.  When  the  letter  comes  at  last  it  is  from  a  dying 


376  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

man ;  and  she,  as  she  hurries  to  him,  meets  with  death 
on  a  wild  night  of  storm.  Her  corpse  is  discovered  by 
the  man  to  whom  she  was  affianced  before  Barron  crossed 
her  path.  The  conclusion  reminds  us  of  Mr.  Hardy's 
Return  of  the  Native  ;  and,  like  the  earlier  tale,  Mr.  Phill- 
potts'  story  suffers  from  an  element  of  the  improbable 
and  melodramatic. 

Children  of  the  Mist,  though  exasperatingly  loose  in 
plot-construction,  is  an  advance  in  realism  and  charac- 
terisation. The  tale  brings  us  to  Dartmoor  ;  and  from 
this  date  Mr.  Phillpotts  followed  his  stereotyped  pattern 
sedulously  and  with  varying  success.  Among  the  best 
of  the  later  books  are  TheJRiver  (1902),  in  which  the  Dart 
dominates  the  whole  tale,  The  Secret  Woman  (1905),  The 
Whirlwind  (1907),  The  Mother  (1908),  The  Three  Brothers 
(1909).  On  a  secondary  level  may  be  placed  Sons  of  the 
Morning  (1900),  the  over-literary  and  pedantic  American 
Prisoner  (1904),  The  Portreeve  (1906)  and  The  Forest  on 
the  Hill  (1912).  Besides  these  he  has  written  a  number 
of  volumes  of  lesser  note  and  published  various  collections 
of  short  tales. 

... TheJBeacon  (1911)  differed  from  its  Dartmoor  predecessors 
for  a  number  of  years  by  choosing  for  theme  a  contrast 
between  Lizzie  Denster,  the  woman  from  the  cities  dimly 
aware  of  new  ideas,  with  the  simple  men  and  women  of 
the  village.  The  contrast  is  treated  strongly  and  with 
effect ;  and  the  book  marks  a  pleasurable  break  in  the 
monotony  of  Mr.  Phillpotts'  plot-ideas.  And  Widecombe 
Fair  (1913)  was  again  a  surprise.  Mr.  Phillpotts'  Tiumour 
is  occasional  and  laboured  ;  but  in  Widecombe  Fair  he 
has  written  a  large  book,  without  plot  or  story  worthy  the 
name,  in  which,  with  a  very  genuine  humour,  he  has  sketched 
in  large  outline  and  as  one  picture  the  whole  life  of  a 
village.  Differing  in  character  from  most  of  his  work, 
it  was  one  of  his  best  and  most  human  books  for  many 
years. 

In  Widecombe  Fair  Mr.  Phillpotts  believed  himself  to 
have  brought  to  a  conclusion  the  long  series  of  his  Dart- 
moor novels,  and  he  contributed  to  the  volume  a  fore- 
word, in  which,  quoting  Nietzsche,  he  declared  that  it 
had  been  his  attempt  as  a  writer  to  say  "  yea  "  to  life, 
"  to  display  a  will  to  life  rejoicing  at  its  own  vitality," 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  377 

to  write  of  things  as  they  are  and  thus  escape  the  "  hell 
of  realism  or  sentimentality."  Thence  he  turned  to  justify 
himself  against  the  charge  that  his  scenery  played  as 
important  part  in  the  plot  as  the  characters  of  the  tale. 
He  asserted  rightly  that  man  is  of  the  seasons  and  elements, 
moulded  in  his  career  by  the  forces  of  nature.  The  story 
of  man's  environment  is  the  story  of  man.  "  We  may 
incarnate  the  seasons  and  set  them  moving,  mighty  and 
magic-fingered,  upon  the  face  of  the  earth,  to  tell  a 
story  laden  with  unsleeping  activities,  mysterious  nega- 
tions and  frustrations,  battles  and  plots,  tragedies  and 
triumphs." 

If  any  one  book  of  Mr.  Phillpotts  is  to  be  chosen  before 
the  others,  perhaps  The  Whirlwind  is  the  most  complete, 
rounded  and  artistic  piece  of  work  he  has  given  us.  The 
plot  is  handled  with  skill  and  resourcefulness,  the  characters 
are  few,  the  three  principal  actors,  two  men  and  a  woman, 
are  powerfully  drawn,  and  the  interplay  of  animal  vitality, 
morbid  ill-health,  scepticism  and  religious  belief  gives  the 
tale  a  strong  interest.  The  old  story — the  sacrifice  of 
virtue  for  the  sake  of  the  husband — is  handled  by  Mr. 
Phillpotts  in  a  strikingly  new  and  original  manner. 

The  limitations  of  Mr.  Phillpotts'  work  are  patent  to  all. 
Talent  deliberately  and  industriously  directed  is  the  source 
of  these  novels  ;  inspiration  is  rare,  save  in  those  moments 
of  impassioned  nature-painting  in  which  Mr.  Phillpotts 
shows  himself  a  master  of  style  and  language.  The  dialogue 
of  his  tales  only  too  often  belongs  not  to  the  characters 
but  to  the  author  ;  and  the  thoughts  which  find  utterance 
in  the  dialect  of  his  peasantry  are  far  beyond  their  range. 
Their  conversations  are  wholly  unreal ;  and  the  majority 
of  his  secondary  characters  are  untrue  to  type,  invented 
not  on  the  moor  but  in  the  study.  As  a  chronicler  of 
moorland  people  Mr.  Phillpotts  will  not  bear  comparison 
with  John  Trevena.  Further,  both  in  dialogue  and 
description  he  is  lengthy  and  formless  ;  he  would  be  a 
better  artist  were  he  content  with  fewer  words.  Never- 
theless, though  not  possessed  of  a  creative  or  original 
mind,  he  is  not  without  the  power  of  drawing  character 
vividly  and  truly  ;  and  his  work  is  always  thoughtful,  for 
Mr.  Phillpotts  has  sincerely  and  earnestly  considered  life, 
weighing  its  meaning  in  the  balances. 


378  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

The  literature  of  Dartmoor  has  been  growing  steadily 
for  many  years.  The  fascination  of  this  bare  upland  is 
natural,  for  it  is  one  of  the  few  wild  and  untameable  tracts 
of  southern  England.  A  land  of  barren  wastes,  sharp  tors, 
craggy  hills  rising  abruptly  into  wind,  mist  and  rain  ; 
it  is  set  like  a  rugged  island,  cliff-bound,  among  the  shady 
orchards  and  meadowed  valleys  of  Devonshire.  At  its 
greatest  height  it  is  a  little  over  two  thousand  feet ;  it 
stretches  only  twenty-three  miles  north  and  south  and 
twenty  east  and  west.  But  height  and  expanse  are  no 
measure  for  a  hill-country.  Low  hills,  abrupt  and  con- 
trasting sharply  with  their  surroundings,  have  all  the 
effect  and  grandeur  of  greater  mountains  in  other  situa- 
tions. Dartmoor  is  a  land  to  itself,  inhabited,  like  Tyrol 
or  the  highlands  of  Bavaria,  by  a  peculiar  mountain  race  ; 
a  land  of  steep  skies,  rolling  clouds,  shrouding  mists  and 
the  unceasing  rustle  of  the  wind  in  heather  and  grass. 

It  is  impossible  to  name  Mr.  Phillpotts  as  an  historian 
of  the  moor  without  being  tempted  to  a  comparison  with 
John  Trevena  (Ernest  G.  Henham).  And, 
John  Trevena.  whether  as  a  landscape  artist  or  as  a  painter 
of  human  character,  John  Trevena  has  the 
greater  genius  of  the  two.  Mr.  Phillpotts,  in  introductory 
chapters,  has  a  hundred  times  described  the  moor,  but 
the  manner  has  grown  stereotyped,  and  in  each  chapter 
that  heralds  a  new  division  of  the  book  we  learn  what  to 
expect.  It  is  good  writing,  often  beautiful,  but  the  matter 
is  nearly  always  extraneous  to  the  story  and  the  manner 
is  laboured.  And,  further,  his  peasantry  are  products  of 
the  study,  not  of  observation  and  experience  ;  they  talk 
not  as  any  Devonshire  moorman  ever  talked,  but,  as  a 
reviewer  wittily  observed,  like  "  Dons  who  have  forgotten 
their  grammar."  The  people  of  Mr.  Phillpotts'  tales  are, 
with  some  exceptions,  an  artifice  invented  beneath  the 
glow  of  the  study  lamp. 

In  the  novels  of 'John  Trevena  Dartmoor  becomes  a 
symbol,  a  brooding  genius  of  destiny.  It  is  this  remarkable 
power  to  personify  the  forces  of  nature,  to  endow  the 
background  of  life's  tragedy  with  mysterious  significance, 
that  makes  Furze  the  Cruel  (1907)  and  Granite  (1909)  such 
astonishing  books.  The  blind  cruelty  of  the  will  to  live 
in  conflict  with  fate,  circumstance  and  character  is  drawn 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  379 

with  a  forcibleness  which  throws  all  but  one  or  two  writers 
of  the  day  into  the  shade.  Furze  the  Cruel,  save  for  the 
carelessness  of  its  design  and  the  tiresome  passages  relating 
to  the  love  affairs  of  Aubrey  and  Boodles,  is  one  of  the 
most  impressive  and  overpowering  books  since  Jude  the 
Obscure.  In  another  aspect  the  style  and  the  characters 
suggest  comparison  with  the  craftsmanship  of  the  author 
of  The  House  with  the  Green  Shutters.  It  remains  the 
strongest  book  John  Trevena  has  written  ;  and  its  merit 
is  not  confined  to  any  single  characteristic.  The  intro- 
ductory chapter,  '  About  Raindrops,'  is  a  piece  of  prose 
and  fine  symbolism  beyond  the  range  and  imagination 
of  most  writers  ;  the  story  of  Pendoggat  and  his  fearful 
fate  has  the  note  of  great  tragedy  ;  and  other  chapters 
of  the  book  are  quickened  with  a  prodigality  of  unforced 
humour.  Furze  is  the  first  member  of  a  trilogy,  continued 
with  Heather  (1908)  and  completed  with  Granite  (1909). 
"  Almost  everywhere  on  Dartmoor  are  Furze,  Heather 
and  Granite.  The  Furze  seems  to  suggest  Cruelty,  the 
Heather  Endurance  and  Granite  Strength."  As  is  often 
the  case  the  later  members  of  the  group  fall  short  of  the 
first.  It  may  be  admitted  that  to  illustrate  the  power  of 
Endurance  is  more  difficult  than  to  exhibit  the  force  of 
Cruelty ;  but  even  if  this  qualification  be  taken  into 
account  Heather  is  a  book  much  inferior  to  its  forerunner. 
The  characters  do  not  impress  themselves  upon  the 
imagination,  the  plot  is  confused  and  the  humour  is  often 
far-sought.  In  Granite  John  Trevena  does  not  rival  Furze, 
yet  he  goes  far  toward  reaching  again  the  standard  of  his 
earlier  work.  The  symbolic  significance  of  Dartmoor 
granite  is  inwoven  with  the  play  of  human  tragedy  and 
comedy  with  a  fine  poetic  power.  The  author  describes 
how  every  day  the  old  stone-breaker,  Will  Yeo,  attacks 
the  granite  in  his  attempt  to  clear  a  patch  of  the  moor. 

"  There  was  the  intoxicating  fascination  of  a  gigantic 
work  in  which  strength  alone  could  serve,  with  just  a 
little  cunning  added.  There  was  the  wild  music  made 
by  the  iron  and  stone  to  be  listened  to  through  life  ; 
chief  of  all  the  privilege  of  being  out  alone  every  day 
subduing  a  force,  while  looking  over  what  appeared  to 
be  the  whole  world  stretched  below,  with  the  keen 


380  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

winds  tossing  the  clouds  along,  and  strange  voices 
coming  out  of  the  nooks  and  corners — that  was  to  live 
and  not  know  weakness." 

In  consistency,  balance  and  power  Furze  and  Granite 
stand  first  among  John  Trevena's  books.  The  trilogy 
was  preceded  by  A  Pixy  in  Petticoats  (1906),  a  slight  and 
entertaining  narrative  and  the  most  popular  of  his  books, 
and  Arminel  of  the  West  (1907),  which  was  a  failure  and 
deserved  to  be.  The  tale  is  absurdly  disjointed  and  incon- 
sequent, violent  and  morbid. 

Since  the  completion  of  his  trilogy  John  Trevena 
has  never  again  written  with  equal  power.  There  are  in 
Bracken  (1910)  passages  descriptive  of  grasses  and  flowers 
which  rival  the  best  writing  of  Jefferies  ;  but  the  curious 
story,  based  upon  the  study  of  dual  personality,  lapses 
into  a  confused  welter  of  mysticism  and  morbid  imagina- 
tion. Wintering  Hay  (1912)  combines  the  chaotic  mysticism 
of  Bracken  with  stronger  elements  from  the  preceding 
volumes.  The  descriptions  of  Blue  Violet  are  most 
beautiful,  and  in  the  characterisation  of  the  vagabond 
scoundrel,  Kit  Coke,  John  Trevena  regains  his  earlier 
vein  of  humour ;  but,  in  all,  the  book  is  a  confused  and 
shapeless  piece  of  work.  Sleeping  Waters  (1913)  is  the 
story  of  the  hallucination  of  a  madman,  and  the  unbridled 
imagination  of  the  author  runs  riot.  The  lack  of  construc- 
tive art  and  the  elaborate  aimlessness  of  the  dialogue  in 
No  Place  Like  Home  (1913)  render  the  whole  book  weari- 
some. 

In  performance  John  Trevena  has  never  fully  realised 
his  powers.  Furze  the  Cruel  contained  writing  that  stood 
out  in  the  wastes  of  contemporary  fiction  as  something 
wholly  exceptional  and  astonishing  in  relentless  force, 
sardonic  humour  and  the  rude  strength  of  the  character- 
drawing  ;  and  the  sheer  poetry  and  beauty  of  many  of 
the  descriptive  passages  were  unrivalled  by  any  writer 
who  had  worked  in  the  same  field.  In  comparison  Mr. 
Phillpotts  and  Mr.  Baring-Gould  were  weaklings  achieving 
failure  and  only  to  be  commended  for  good  intention. 
Unfortunately  John  Trevena,  though  imagination  and 
poetry  are  still  with  him,  has  never  reached  the  same 
level  of  writing  again.  But  whether  or  no  he  ever  pro- 


CHAP,  in]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  381 

duces  a  fitting  companion  to  Furze,  it  was  a  remarkable 
achievement  to  have  written  that  one  book. 

Among  living  novelists  the  number  of  those  who  may 
be  counted  with  the  realistic  painters  of  life  is  so  large 

that  the  choice  of  illustrative  and  typical 
Gilbert  Caiman,  names  becomes  a  matter  of  almost 
b.  1884.  insuperable  difficulty  ;  and,  further,  the 

dividing  line  between  novels  and  novelists 
in  their  differing  kinds  is  not  easy  to  draw.  A  good  study 
in  contrast  between  the  new  and  the  older  method  of 
representing  men  and  manners  in  contemporary  life  will 
be  found  in  the  apposition  of  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  and 
William  de  Morgan.  They  are  both  frank,  uncom- 
promising, ironical,  humorous,  discursive,  careless  in  their 
methods  and  often  as  much  occupied  with  their  own  ideas 
upon  life  as  the  characters  they  delineate,  yet  in  style 
and  manner  they  are  wholly  dissimilar.  The  one  attempts 
to  use  the  novel  in  a  new  way,  the  other  follows  the 
Victorian  tradition.  Among  novelists  of  the  youngest 
generation  hardly  one  has  shown  greater  promise  than 
Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan,  who  writes  as  one  conversant  with 
books,  culture  and  the  affairs  of  men,  whether  in  high 
places  or  shabby  nooks  and  forsaken  corners.  Moreover 
he  is  possessed  of  wit,  a  happy  turn  of  irony,  and  a  faculty 
for  handling  reflections  upon  life  with  an  acuteness  and 
originality  which  is  reminiscent  of  Samuel  Butler.  This 
resemblance  is  most  noticeable  in  Round  the  Corner  (1913), 
a  story  of  ups  and  downs  in  a  clergyman's  family.  Mr. 
Cannan  cannot  be  accused  of  plagiarising,  he  may  never 
have  read  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  but  it  is  impossible  not 
to  call  Butler  to  mind  when  reading  his  book.  The 
resemblance  is  less  in  the  story  and  characters  than  in 
the  ironic,  yet  wise  and  sympathetic  attitude  of  mind 
common  to  both  writers.  Samuel  Butler  had  more 
versatility,  knowledge  and  independence ;  Mr.  Cannan 
writes  as  a  younger  man,  but  as  a  young  man  who  has 
thought  about  life  and  gained  from  his  experience  matter 
worth  the  keeping. 

His  first  novel,  Peter  Homunculus  (1909),  is  ill-con- 
structed, and  falls  into  two  parts  so  slightly  homogeneous 
that  they  might  well  be  placed  in  separate  covers,  though 
they  relate  the  story  of  one  life.  The  picture  of  Peter 


382  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Davies,  the  raw  youth  of  talent,  cataloguing  in  the  second- 
hand bookshop  in  Shaftesbury  Avenue,  and  the  character 
of  X.  Cooper,  the  shabby  book  dealer,  contain  workman- 
ship worthy  of  high  praise.  The  old  man  in  his  shop, 
mouthing  to  his  boy-assistant  philosophies  of  life  and 
conduct,  is  an  extraordinarily  living  creature  of  the 
imagination.  "  Fear  of  life  !  "  he  croaks  in  a  broken  and 
uncertain  voice.  "It  is  in  all  of  us.  That  being  so,  we 
can  do  nothing  in  this  world,  Homunculus,  except  to  be 
kind  and  strive  always  to  be  kinder  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  and 
damn  morality."  The  earlier  portion  of  the  book  is 
wonderfully  genuine  and  true ;  in  the  latter  half,  in 
which  we  see  Peter  emerging  into  higher  planes  of  social 
life  and  taking  his  part  with  success  in  attempts  at  witty 
dialogue,  the  reader  grows  weary  of  the  monotony  and 
hankers  for  the  more  human  scenes  of  the  dingy  book- 
shop. The  tiresome  pages  of  the  second  half  of  the  tale 
are  doubtless  designed  to  present  a  hard  contrast  with 
the  truth  and  human  interest  of  the  earlier  scenes,  but 
they  are  unnecessarily  lengthy  and  overreach  their 
purpose. 

Devious  Ways  (1910)  likewise  begins  with  the  story  of 
the  hero  in  boyhood  and  carries  it  forward  through  devious 
ways — a  mean  childhood  in  mean  streets,  wanderings  in 
America,  Africa  and  the  Far  East  to  married  life  in  London. 
Through  it  all  runs  the  idea  only  realised  by  the  hero 
when  he  has  been  faithless,  that,  "  all  peace  and  happiness 
hang  from  what  men  choose  to  make  of  women."  Mr. 
Cannan  does  not  shirk  the  baser  and  more  sordid  aspects 
of  life  ;  but  he  is  an  idealist.  It  is  he  who  speaks  in  the 
words  of  his  hero  when  he  asserts  that  the  true  principles 
of  the  dramatic  art  are  not  to  make  people  think,  but 
to  show  the  drab,  dull  and  mean  as  more  hopeless  and 
joy-killing  than  they  are,  to  make  people  "  feel  and  fully 
to  grasp  the  guiding  principles  of  the  world  and  of  life, 
to  make  them  see  the  dividing  line  between  good  and 
evil,  between  light  and  darkness,  right  and  wrong."  And 
in  his  devious  and  rambling  tale  Mr.  Cannan  succeeds  in 
making  us  feel  something  of  all  this,  in  exciting  our  faith 
in  the  original  integrity  of  human  nature.  In  spite  of  his 
biting  irony  there  is  something  clear,  strong  and  poetic 
in  his  style  and  in  his  attitude  toward  the  simple  realities 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  388 

of  daily  life  ;  and  he  has  a  fine  sense  of  perspective  and 
proportion  in  the  choosing  of  what  is  great  and  significant 
in  the  actions  of  men  and  women.  Although  his  com- 
mentary upon  the  world  is  often  tinged  with  cynicism  he 
still  makes  us  feel  that  life  is  to  be  chosen,  for  he  sees  the 
individual  not  in  isolation,  but  as  a  part  of  the  common 
battle  in  which  we  may  sometimes  triumph  and  our  defeats 
are  not  always  irretrievable.  Mr.  Cannan  cannot,  there- 
fore, understand  life  represented  in  isolated  incidents  and 
brief  crises  ;  he  must  see  his  men  and  women  in  long 
perspective.  Each  of  his  novels  is  a  life-story.  He  begins 
with  boyhood,  and  leads  his  character  to  manhood  and 
the  knowledge  that  comes  of  plucking  the  fruits  of  good 
and  evil. 

The  bondage  of  the  soul  and  imagination  when  confined 
by  the  bars  of  social  convention  is  the  ruling  idea  of  Little 
Brother  (1912),  Round  the  Corner  and  Old  Mole  (1914). 
In  these  the  conflict  of  character  with  environment  and 
artificial  education  is  seen  from  differing  points  of  view. 
If  Butler's  influence  may  be  traced  in  Round  the  Corner., 
the  inconsequent  and  aphoristic  manner  of  Little  Brother 
reminds  us  of  the  author  of  Tristram  Shandy.  In  Old 
Mole  Mr.  Cannan  begins  with  a  whimsical  sketch  of  an 
old  schoolmaster,  a  student  of  Lucretius  and  Voltaire, 
who,  on  account  of  a  ridiculous  misunderstanding,  is  flung 
out  of  his  place  and  dropped  into  a  travelling  theatrical 
company.  Unfortunately  the  later  chapters  of  the  tale 
subside  into  what  is  little  more  than  a  sustained  cynical 
diatribe  against  the  false  aims  of  social  England.  And, 
as  Mr.  Cannan  has  little  to  do  but  pour  scorn  into  his 
judgments  of  matters  in  general,  his  pages  grow  dull, 
for  we  are  listening  to  the  special  pleader  who  weakens 
his  case  by  blackening  the  cause  of  his  opponents.  With 
Samuel  Butler  Mr.  Cannan  is  to  be  counted  with  the 
rebels.  "Some,"  he  writes,  "are  sold  for  work  which 
all  their  lives  they  do  not  comprehend  ;  some  are  bought 
in  body,  some  in  mind,  some  in  both.  The  soul,  the 
imagination,  is  never  bought.  In  bondage  it  is  turned 
inward,  and  provokes  a  sense  of  wrong,  a  dull  and  never- 
ending  ache."  In  these  words  is  summed  the  underlying 
thought  of  Mr.  Cannan's  later  novels.  He  is  a  writer 
who  has  studied  life  and  human  nature  and  has  something 


884  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

to  say.  He  has  knowledge  and  wit,  and  he  will  throw 
carelessly  into  one  book  what  many  would  use  to  fit  out 
the  content  of  half  a  dozen.  Little  Brother  is  his  most 
original  piece  of  writing  ;  Round  the  Corner  his  best  novel. 
Curiously  enough,  though  he  has  practised  the  art  of  the 
drama,  his  novels  are  singularly  undramatic.  Even  if, 
as  in  Round  the  Corner,  he  have  a  sufficient  story  to  tell, 
the  action  of  the  narrative  runs  its  course  through  the 
minds  and  thoughts  of  the  actors,  not  in  external  event. 

Mr.  E.  M.  Forster,  a  careful  and  fastidious  worker,  has 
printed  little,  if  account  be  taken  of  the  ten  years  or 
more  during  which  he  has  been  writing. 
E.  M.  Forster,          It  may  be  suspected  that  the  mystic  and 
b.  1879.  allegorical  tales  of  The  Celestial  Omnibus 

(1911),  in  part  inspired  by  sympathy  with 
the  esoteric  meaning  of  classic  myth,  are  nearer  to  the 
author's  thought  and  mind  than  the  novels  ;  for  hints  of 
his  consciousness  of  spiritual  communion  with  nature  are 
not  infrequent  in  his  tales  of  commonplace  social  life, 
and  in  The  Longest  Journey  (1907)  he  makes  special 
reference  to  two  tales  of  The  Celestial  Omnibus.  In  these 
stories  Mr.  Forster  shows  himself  a  scholar  possessed  of 
poetic  imagination,  a  man  of  thought,  and,  at  the  same 
time,  an  observer  in  satiric  mood  of  quite  ordinary  and 
commonplace  human  beings.  His  satiric  bent  of  mind  is 
naturally  more  emphasised  in  the  novels,  in  which  no 
single  admirable  character  is  found.  A  serious  satirist 
Mr.  Forster  is,  but  without  bitterness  or  undue  self- 
importance  ;  for  he  has  learned  of  Meredith's  Comic  Muse, 
of  whom  he  more  than  once  makes  open  mention.  With 
Meredith  he  understands  that  if  life  be  never  wholly  as 
the  colour  and  perfume  of  the  rose,  it  is  likewise  never 
completely  a  dirty  drab,  and  if  not  entirely  lovable  yet 
not  unworthy  of  love,  for  man  is  weak,  ever  fighting  a 
losing  battle  against  superior  forces. 

Mr.  Forster  published  first  Where  Angels  Fear  to  Tread 
(1905),  a  story  of  a  curious  and  uncommon  character, 
throwing  into  contrast,  briefly  and  without  great  elabora- 
tion, the  gulfs  fixed  between  the  northern  temper  of  an 
over-civilised  Englishwoman  and  the  natural  impulses  of 
the  South  personified  in  her  Italian  husband.  In  this 
book  he  makes  his  characters  live,  he  is  successful  in 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  385 

epigram,  and  his  asides  are  those  of  a  man  who  stops  to 
think  for  himself;    but  his  comedy  borders  on  farce  and 
the  narrative  scarcely  escapes  the  ridiculous.    The  Longest 
Journey,  which  is  apparently  a  story  in  part  autobio- 
graphical, marks  a  great  advance  in  concentration,  power 
of  sustained   effort   and   the  vivifying   of  a   number   of 
characters  groping  and  failing  in  a  world  of  weak  and 
misguided  ideals.    This  book,  together  with  The  Celestial 
Omnibus,   in   quality  of  craftsmanship  may  be  counted 
the  best  of  his  writing.    A  Room  with  a  View  (1908)  is  an 
attempt  at  a  more  commonplace  type  of  comedy,  despite 
the  author's  good  memory  for  Meredith.     Howard's  End 
(1910)  is  the  most  difficult  reading  of  any  of  his  books, 
and  not  wholly  consistent.    The  originality  of  his  insight 
and  the  independence  of  his  thought  give  to  the  writing 
characteristics  of  its  own,  but  in  the  actors  as   we  see 
them  in  the  conclusion  it  is  difficult  to  find  those  whom 
we  met  in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  tale.     The  narrative 
suggests  that  the  author,  suspecting  a  tameness  in  incident 
for  the  ordinary  reader,  suddenly  betook  himself  to  the 
overloaded  passions  and  tragedies  with  which  he  closes. 
Howard's  End  would  have  been  a  better  and  more  power- 
ful   book   if    Mr.    Forster   had   passed   by   the    stronger 
emotions. 

William    de    Morgan    was     the    least     precocious     of 
novelists,  and  to  this  fact,  in  part,  may  be  attributed  the 
applause   with   which   his   first   books 
William  de  Morgan,    were   received.     That   a   man   should 
1839-1917.  print    his    first    novel    in    his    sixty- 

seventh  year  is  remarkable  ;  and  even 
more  remarkable  the  fact  that  it  should  be  a  distinctive 
piece  of  work.  As  a  young  man  De  Morgan  yielded  to 
his  ambitions  as  a  painter,  shortly  abandoned  the  brush 
and  canvas  for  ceramics,  and  for  the  greater  part  of  his 
life  he  designed  tiles  and  pottery.  He  was  a  friend 
of  William  Morris,  and,  within  a  certain  circle,  had  been 
well  known  for  years  ;  and  his  new  venture  at  so  late 
a  stage  of  life  came  as  a  surprise.  Joseph  Vance  (1906) 
was  both  a  remarkably  good  a  id  a  curiously  old-fashioned 
piece  of  writing.  Dickens  and  Thackeray  were  the  com- 
parisons which  came  instinctively  to  mind  on  the  appear- 
ance of  this  discursive,  irregular  and  lengthy  story.  As  a 

2  c 


386  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

general  description  of  De  Morgan's  method  the  term, 
"  Early  Victorian,"  which  he  resented,  is  apt  and  justifiable. 
These  modern  Victorian  novels  have  all  the  appearance 
of  having  been  written  at  haphazard  for  monthly  pub- 
lication, like  the  tales  of  Thackeray  and  Dickens.  The 
names,  the  entire  disregard  of  plot,  the  irrelevancies  of 
matter,  the  optimistic,  matter-of-fact  absence  of  intro- 
spection, save  the  most  elementary  and  superficial,  the 
strain  of  pleasantly  tempered  sentiment,  all  take  us  back 
to  the  'fifties  and  'sixties  of  the  last  century.  William  De 
Morgan  illustrates,  therefore,  nothing  that  is  new  :  his 
true  place  is  a  volume  on  Victorian  novelists.  And  in 
that  volume  Joseph  Vance,  and,  with  less  emphasis,  It 
Never  Can  Happen  Again  (1909),  and  When  Ghost  Meets 
Ghost  (1914),  should  be  named  with  honour.  Alice  for 
Short  (1907),  his  second  tale,  reflects  the  first  in  slightly 
different  terms  with  far  less  spontaneity  of  manner  and 
less  wealth  of  matter.  Somehow  Good  (1908)  is  not  so 
diffuse  as  his  other  tales,  but  its  plot-idea,  loss  of  memory 
due  to  shock  in  a  London  tube,  is  fantastic  at  first  and 
becomes  laboured  later.  An  Affair  of  Dishonour  (1910) 
is  an  historical  romance  that  can  add  nothing  to  De 
Morgan's  credit ;  and  A  Likely  Story  (1911)  is  the  shortest, 
the  most  discursive  and  the  least  likely  of  his  tales.  Some- 
thing might  be  made  in  another  vein  of  the  picture  which 
speaks  and  relates  its  experiences,  but  in  a  conglomerate 
of  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  Pendennis  and  David  Copper- 
field  the  whole  story  becomes  incongruous. 

In  Joseph  Vance,  with  its  odd  humours,  caricatures, 
irrelevant  excursions,  and  sprawling  yet  wonderfully  faith- 
ful characterisation  of  the  lower  life  of  London  De 
Morgan  wrote  a  real  book,  the  summary  of  a  life's  observa- 
tion. In  some  degree  he  exhausted  himself  with  his 
first  venture  :  in  no  succeeding  volume  has  he  shown  the 
same  abundance  of  humour,  whimsy,  thought  and  wealth 
of  character-drawing.  It  is  chiefly  as  a  painter  of  street 
and  gutter  life  that  he  is  successful ;  and,  even  so,  his 
workpeople  are  of  a  past  age,  not  modern  artisans  con- 
testing problems  inculcated  by  the  mass  meeting  and 
the  tutorial  class. 

The  novel  of  street  life  and  cockney  dialect  has 
not  greatly  flourished  since  the  day  of  Dickens.  The 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  387 

romantic  and  the   idealising  tendency  of  Dickens'   tem- 
perament led  him  to  represent  that  life  as  more  joyous 

than  it  actually  is ;  and  the  truth  of 
The  Cockney  his  dialect  is,  in  the  opinion  of  the  best 

Dialect  Novel.         judges,    more    than    questionable.      Mr. 

Arthur  Morrison's  temper  and  method 
is  wholly  different.  His  Tales  of  Mean  Streets  (1894)  is 
a  book  written  in  a  spirit  of  harsh  realism  or  grim 
humour.  A  Child  of  the  Jago  (1896)  and  To  London 
Town  (1899)  are  companion  pictures  of  life  in  the  east 
end  of  London.  Mr.  Morrison's  strongest  writing  is  to  be 
found  in  his  first  book,  which  he  has  never  surpassed. 
He  there  showed  himself  a  discerning  spectator  of  life  in 
slums  and  mean  streets.  But  he  has  since  been  led  astray, 
by  ingenuity  in  contriving  the  clever  twist  of  incident, 
into  writing  detective  stories,  and  it  is  a  misfortune  that 
he  has  not  followed  up  the  stronger  and  more  truthful 
writing  of  his  first  book.  Mr.  William  Somerset  Maugham 
now  writes  chiefly  for  the  stage,  but  in  Liza  of  Lambeth 
(1897)  he  published  a  distinctive  and  striking  novel  of  the 
London  streets.  Mr.  Barry  Pain  and  Mr.  Pett  Ridge  are 
also  to  be  named  as  writers  who  have  studied  the  cockney 
character  and  write  realistically  and  with  humour. 

If  we  turn  to  the  youngest  generation  of  writers  who 
are  engaged  with  the  observation  and  the  rendering  of 
contemporary  life  in  its  myriad  social  phases,  the  number 
of  the  names  and  the  wealth  of  the  material  offered  for 
inspection  compels  us  to  do  no  more  than  brush  by  with 
a  passing  mention  which  is  not  intended  to  carry  with 
it  any  slight  or  disparagement.  Among  the  youngest  are 
Mr.  E.  Temple  Thurston,  Mr.  Hugh  Walpole,  Mr.  Compton 
Mackenzie,  author  of  the  two  striking  novels,  Carnival 
(1912)  and  Sinister  Street  (1913),  and  Mr.  Oliver  Onions. 

An  age  of  science  (though  science  be  the  opposite  of 
poetry)  and  mechanical  invention  has  not  destroyed  the 

possibilities  of  romantic  experience  or 
Joseph  Conrad.  romantic  imagination.  If,  on  the  whole, 
b.  1857.  the  weight  of  intellectual  power  with  the 

drama  and  the  novel  lies  on  the  side  of 
those  writers  who  care  most  for  an  exact  chronicle  of 
the  life  of  man  as  it  is  to-day,  the  writers  of  romance, 
or  the  realistic  coloured  by  romance,  are  far  from  repre- 


388  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

senting  a  subordinate  group,  and  in  the  matter  of  style 
and  literary  gift  Mr.  Conrad,  Mr.  Hewlett  and  Mr.  Hichens 
have  no  equals  among  authors  who  have  been  treated 
earlier  in  this  chapter.  Even  the  reader  who  is  tempted 
to  carp  at  Mr.  Conrad's  psychology  will  admit  the  beauty 
and  the  splendour  of  his  style.  And  his  mastery  of  our 
language  is  the  more  remarkable  if  it  be  remembered 
that  he  did  not  learn  English  till  he  was  nearly  twenty. 
Thereafter  for  twenty  years  Jozef  Konrad  Korzeniowski 
sailed  the  seas  on  British  craft ;  and  at  the  age  of  thirty- 
eight  no  printed  book  stood  to  his  credit.  But  during 
his  years  at  sea  he  read  French  and  English  literature 
widely,  evidently  with  the  thought  of  becoming  an  author. 
Almayer  s  Folly  was  begun  at  sea,  long  carried  about  in 
manuscript,  nourished  in  the  imagination,  and  finished 
during  a  stay  ashore.  "  For  many  years,"  writes  Mr. 
Conrad,  "  he  [Almayer]  and  the  world  of  his  story  had 
been  the  companions  of  my  imagination  without,  I  hope, 
imparing  my  abilities  to  deal  with  the  realities  of  sea 
life."  Almayer 's  story  was  finished  and  published.  Mr. 
Conrad  abandoned  the  British  Mercantile  Marine  and 
embarked  on  the  profession  of  letters  with  a  better  know- 
ledge of  the  sea  than  any  English  writer  since  Marryat, 
and  a  rich,  glowing  English  style  to  which  Marryat  could 
make  no  pretence.  The  greater  number  of  Mr.  Conrad's 
novels  and  tales,  and  certainly  the  best  of  them,  are  drawn 
from  his  experience  of  life  on  the  high  seas,  in  strange 
lands,  amid  unfamiliar  and  exotic  surroundings,  on  coral 
islands  of  the  Pacific,  among  Malays,  Africans,  Chinese, 
and  the  strangely  assorted  rally  of  Europeans  and 
Americans  who  go  down  to  the  sea  in  ships  and  fail  to 
observe  the  wonders  of  the  deep.  Almayer' s  Folly  (1895) 
narrates  the  tragedy  of  a  Dutch  trader  whose  Malay  wife 
reverts  to  the  ways  of  her  people  while  his  daughter  runs 
away  with  a  Malay  chieftain.  An  Outcast  of  the  Islands 
(1896)  continues  the  story  of  Almayer  ;  The  Nigger  of 
the  Narcissus  (1897)  is  a  tale  of  life  in  the  forecastle  ; 
Talcs  of  Unrest  (1898),  which  was  crowned  by  the  Academy, 
is  a  collection  of  short  stories  of  wild  or  out-of-the-way 
life.  And  among  the  other  volumes  of  short  tales  are  Youth 
(1902),  Typhoon  (1903)  and  'Twixt  Land  and  Sea  (1912). 
Lord  Jim  (1900)  is  the  most  elaborate  of  Mr.  Conrad's 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  389 

studies  of  character.  A  young  mate  fails  once  in  his  duty, 
his  mind  is  morbidly  obsessed  with  the  consciousness  of 
failure,  he  hides  himself  and  his  disgrace  among  Malays 
of  the  Pacific  islands  and  recovers  his  self-respect  in  the 
influence  he  gains  over  them.  Nostromo  (1904),  with  a 
scene  laid  in  South  America,  again  turns  upon  the  problem 
of  self-respect.  In  Chance  (1914)  Mr.  Conrad,  with  a 
result  not  altogether  happy,  carries  a  part  of  his  narrative 
away  from  the  sea,  and  in  this  section  of  his  tale  is  involved 
in  a  tangled  psychology  of  a  length  unnecessary  to  the 
explication  of  the  remainder  of  his  story.  The  reversals 
and  retracings  of  the  plot  are  as  circuitous  as  in  the  case 
of  Lord  Jim,  and  the  reader  gains  less  ;  for  the  relation- 
ship at  sea  of  the  captain,  his  wife  and  her  vicious  father, 
developed  as  a  curious  intensive  drama,  has  not  sufficient 
substance  to  support  the  verbose  narration.  And  Mr. 
Conrad's  mannerisms  have  begun  to  conquer  him.  Under 
Western  Eyes  (1911)  is  a  picture  of  Russian  political  con- 
spiracy as  seen  by  the  eyes  of  the  Westerner  who  relates 
the  story. 

Although  Mr.  Conrad  sets  nearly  all  his  tales  in  an 
atmosphere  of  romance  and  rough  seafaring  he  is  not 
merely  the  romantic  chronicler.  The  bent  of  his  genius 
leads  him  to  involved  psychological  study,  and  his  gift 
of  style  prompts  him  to  elaborate  descriptions  of  person- 
ality and  scenery.  The  romance  of  adventure,  as  it  was 
written  by  Scott,  Stevenson  and  Dumas,  he  does  not 
write.  He  blends  with  sea-faring  experience  the  psychology 
and  theory  of  fiction  evolved  by  the  author  of  What  Maisie 
Knew,  and  the  result  is  not  seldom  curious  and  incon- 
gruous. Like  Henry  James  he  has  adopted  the  method  of 
continuous  exposition  by  the  author's  self  and  the  principle 
of  the  point  of  view.  These  tendencies  in  his  work  are 
naturally  more  apparent  in  the  longer  novels  than  in 
the  short  stories  in  which  he  has  not  the  same  elbowroom. 
Lord  Jim,  Under  Western  Eyes  and  Chance  are  typical 
of  intricate  study  of  mental  phenomena.  The  method 
adopted  in  each  book  is  very  similar.  In  Lord  Jim  the 
story  opens  with  narrative  in  the  third  person  by  the 
author  ;  then  we  turn  to  a  long,  indirect,  zig-zag  recital 
by  a  spectator  of  the  hero's  subsequent  career.  In  Under 
Western  Eyes  the  story  is  retold  from  a  personal  point  of 


390  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

view  but  abstracted  from  the  manuscript  of  a  character 
who  plays  a  part  in  the  tale.  In  Chance  the  point  of  view 
crosses  and  recrosses.  The  result,  especially  in  Lord  Jim, 
is  a  prolix  complexity  of  mental  analysis  which  it  is 
difficult  to  believe  could  have  any  conscious  or  uncon- 
scious play  in  the  mind  of  the  mate  of  a  crazy  steamer 
plying  the  Indian  Ocean.  These  bewildering  mazes  of 
introspection  are  incongruous  with  the  environment  and 
the  characters  of  the  tale.  In  a  life  of  cultured  leisure 
they  might  be  credible,  but  not  in  a  world  of  action. 
Further,  Mr.  Conrad's  narrative  can  hardly  be  followed 
with  pleasure,  for  he  has  no  conception  of  the  broad  high- 
way of  the  human  heart.  His  love  of  beginning  in  the 
middle  and  catching  up  the  tags  of  the  past,  while  he 
meanders  toward  the  future,  is  exasperatingly  confusing. 
Ibsen  often,  in  like  manner,  begins  in  the  moment  of  crisis, 
but  the  development  of  the  drama  picks  up  the  thread 
of  the  past  with  an  unhesitating  sureness  and  ease  of 
movement.  Mr.  Conrad  has  no  vestige  of  this  art.  He 
has  disclaimed  classification  with  the  writers  of  adven- 
turous romance,  and  asserted  that  he  wishes  to  make  us 
feel,  think  and  hear.  It  may,  however,  be  doubted  whether 
these  erratic  leapings  backward  and  forward  represent 
the  workings  of  any  ordinary  mind  engaged  with  a  single 
personality  and  his  life-history.  If  we  ask  how  we  come 
to  understand  the  hero  of  Lord  Jim,  the  answer  is — 
through  the  exegetical  commentary  of  the  author  and 
his  mouthpiece,  Marlow.  Though  we  are  thus  forced  to. 
piece  the  narrative  together  from  a  maze  of  digressive 
moods  and  impressions,  the  wonder  is  that  we  are  con- 
tinually conscious  of  touch  with  life,  mystery  and  romance. 
The  splendid  colouring  and  the  cadences  of  the  style 
enthrall  us  ;  the  mystery  of  life  and  the  joy  of  youth 
flood  the  narrative.  In  Mr.  Conrad's  studies  of  the  problems 
of  the  soul  there  are  no  psychological  megrims,  no  morbid 
introspectivity.  The  spirit  which  giveth  life  is  every- 
where present  in  his  novels. 

From  Henry  James  he  has  learned  much  ;  but  the 
secret  of  form  Mr.  Conrad  has  never  made  his  own.  His 
longer  tales  are  confused  inextricably ;  and  his  short 
stories  are  wonderful  impressions  rather  than  conies. 
Nevertheless,  of  their  kind  there  is  hardly  anything  to 


CHAP,  in]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  391 

surpass  them  in  English  fiction  ;  for  in  his  short  stories 
Mr.  Conrad  has  less  room  for  psychology  and  description, 
although  his  descriptive  passages  are  still  too  frequent 
and  obtrusive.  Beauty  of  form  these  stories  lack  ;  but 
their  style  is  a  matter  of  continual  astonishment  when  we 
remember  that  Mr.  Conrad  did  not  speak  English  till  he 
was  twenty.  The  slight  evidences,  which  do  appear, 
that  the  author  is  writing  in  an  acquired  tongue  are  but 
an  added  grace.  '  Youth,'  the  story  of  a  tempestuous 
voyage  to  the  East  in  an  unseaworthy  vessel,  '  The  End 
of  the  Tether,'  the  story  of  a  sea  captain  who  hides  his 
growing  blindness  behind  the  trustworthiness  of  a  Malay 
servant  and  continues  to  steer  his  ship,  '  Typhoon,'  the 
sketch  of  a  vessel  struck  by  a  typhoon,  these  and  others 
are  among  the  best  of  all  short  stories.  The  cadences, 
the  richness,  the  descriptive  power  of  the  style,  the  halo 
of  youth  and  romance  lend  to  them  a  character  unmatched. 
The  English  are  a  race  of  seamen,  but  no  English  writer 
who  ever  took  pen  in  hand  has  painted  a  storm  in  mid- 
ocean  like  Mr.  Conrad.  The  passage  of  '  Typhoon  '  which 
describes  a  vessel  struggling  for  life  in  a  wild  welter  of 
sky  and  sea  is  astonishing  in  its  power,  the  rounded  com- 
pleteness of  its  phrasing  and  the  aptness  of  the  analogical 
pictures  it  summons  in  quick  succession. 

"  The  motion  of  the  ship  was  extravagant.  Her 
lurches  had  an  appalling  helplessness  :  she  pitched  as 
if  taking  a  header  into  a  void,  and  seemed  to  find  a  wall 
to  hit  every  time.  When  she  rolled  she  fell  on  her  side 
headlong,  and  she  would  be  righted  back  by  such  a 
demolishing  blow  that  Jukes  felt  her  rolling  as  a  clubbed 
man  reels  before  he  collapses.  The  gale  howled  and 
scuffled  about  gigantically  in  the  darkness,  as  though 
the  entire  world  were  one  black  gully.  At  certain 
moments  the  air  streamed  against  the  ship  as  if  sucked 
through  a  tunnel  with  a  concentrated  solid  force  of 
impact  that  seemed  to  lift  her  clean  out  of  the  water 
and  keep  her  up  for  an  instant  with  only  a  quiver 
running  through  her  from  end  to  end." 

It  is  difficult  to  conceive  writing  better  and  more  to  the 
purpose  than  this.  Its  descriptive  power  holds  the  reader 
spellbound. 


392  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

4  Youth  '  can  hardly  be  called  a  story.  It  is  a  paean 
to  youth  and  its  conquest  of  adversity.  A  crazy  old  vessel 
sets  sail  with  a  cargo  of  coal  for  the  east ;  she  is  buffeted 
by  the  waves  and  escapes  a  watery  grave  only  to  be  gutted 
by  fire.  But  in  the  memory  of  the  young  ship's  officer 
the  voyage  was  more  glorious  and  wonderful  than  any 
he  took  in  later  life  under  happier  circumstances. 

"  O  youth  !  The  strength  of  it,  the  faith  of  it,  the 
imagination  of  it.  To  me  she  was  not  an  old  rattle- 
trap carting  about  the  world  a  lot  of  coal  for  a  freight 
— to  me  she  was  the  endeavour,  the  test,  the  trial  of 
life.  I  think  of  her  with  pleasure,  with  affection,  with 
regret,  as  you  would  think  of  some  one  dead  you  have 
loved.  I  shall  never  forget  her." 

And  it  is  impossible  not  to  quote  one  more  passage 
from  the  wonderful  story,  a  passage  which  illustrates  the 
style  of  Mr.  Conrad  in  another  aspect,  in  his  descrip- 
tion of  the  spell  that  is  laid  upon  man  by  the  inscrutable 
beauty  of  the  world  into  which  he  is  thrust  blindly  to 
live.  The  young  ship's  officer  of  the  story  reaches  the 
East  at  last,  but  in  an  open  boat. 

"  And  this  is  how  I  see  the  East.  I  have  seen  its 
secret  places  and  I  have  looked  into  its  very  soul ;  but 
now  I  see  it  always  from  a  small  boat,  a  high  outline 
of  mountains,  blue  and  afar  in  the  morning  ;  like  faint 
mist  at  noon  ;  a  jagged  wall  of  purple  at  sunset.  I 
have  the  feel  of  the  oar  in  my  hand,  the  vision  of  a 
scorching  blue  sea  in  my  eyes.  And  I  see  a  bay,  a 
wide  bay,  smooth  as  glass  and  polished  like  ice,  shimmer- 
ing in  the  dark.  .  .  .  Suddenly  a  puff  of  wind,  a  puff  faint 
and  tepid  and  laden  with  strange  odours  of  blossoms, 
of  aromatic  wood,  comes  out  of  the  still  night — the 
first  sigh  of  the  East  on  my  face.  That  I  can  never 
forget.  It  was  impalpable  and  enslaving,  like  a  dream, 
like  a  whispered  promise  of  mysterious  delight." 

Mr.  Conrad  is  not  among  the  greatly  popular  writers 
of  the  day  ;  he  is  something  more  ;  for  it  is  difficult  to 
believe  that  the  best  of  his  work  will  be  forgotten.  The 
gift  of  the  story-teller,  inexhaustible  imagination,  a  tire- 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  393 

less  invention  and  strong  dramatic  instinct,  all  these  in 
joint  company  will  fail  to  ensure  lasting  fame  to  an  author 
who  can  write  so  as  to  be  understood  but  not  admired. 
And,  contrariwise,  nothing  that  has  the  seal  of  a  noble 
and  beautiful  style  upon  it  can  ever  utterly  perish.  The 
philosopher  or  the  scientist  is  not  dependent  upon  a  style, 
that  he  may  influence  his  own  and  succeeding  generations  : 
indubitably  the  creative  artist,  although  he  may  achieve 
a  temporary  vogue  without  style,  for  the  lack  of  this  one 
thing  is  fated  to  an  early  oblivion.  Many  popular  novelists 
of  yester-year  are  now  but  unimportant  names  in  the 
catalogue  and  index. 

Popularity  in  measure  pressed  down  and  running  over 
is  never  likely  to  fall  to  the  lot  of  Mr.  Conrad.  He  is 
wanting  in  just  those  qualities  which  would  commend 
him  to  the  reader  who  asks  to  be  entertained,  not  illumined. 
His  narrative  moves  slowly  and  uncertainly,  the  action 
interests  him  little,  the  motives  of  the  actor  much  ;  he 
is  lavishly,  often  quite  unnecessarily  descriptive  of  the 
characters  and  the  scenes  in  which  they  move  ;  and  the 
best  in  his  books — their  style,  their  joy  of  living,  their 
pervading  consciousness  of  the  mystery  of  man  and  that 
background  of  nature  before  which  he  plays  his  part 
— appeals  only  to  the  imagination  responsive  to  these 
influences.  The  adjective  romantic,  if  used  of  Mr.  Conrad's 
tales,  must  be  understood  in  a  sense  other  than  that  in 
which  we  apply  it  to  Scott  or  Dumas.  His  romanticism 
is  not  the  romance  of  a  stirring  tale  of  adventure,  but  the 
romanticism  of  an  imaginative  and  poetical  vision  of  life, 
as  intensely  stirred  by  the  dark  and  close-smelling  fore- 
castle as  by  the  tropical  splendour  and  blazing  sunlight 
of  the  East  Indies. 

F.  T.  Bullen  did  not  have  the  style,  the  imagination, 

the  passion  for  involved  psychology  which  characterise 

the     genius     of    Mr.     Conrad,    but    he 

Frank  Thomas          wrote    of  sea    life    with    experience,    a 

Bullen,  1857-1915.    native  gift  for  expressing  himself  well, 

and   he    could    paint    scenes  which   he 

knew  vividly   and  realistically.      For   fourteen   years   of 

his   boyhood    and    youth    he   served   on   a   whaler ;    and 

his    first    and    best    book.    The    Cruise    of  the    Cachalot 

(1898),  is  a  transcript  from  his  early  experiences.     The 


394  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

success  of  this  venture  led  him  to  the  writing  of  other 
tales  of  the  sea  ;  and  of  these  may  be  named,  The  Log 
of  a  Sea-waif  (1899),  With  Christ  at  Sea  (1900),  A  Whale- 
man's Wife  (1902)  and  Told  in  the  Dog  Watches  (1910). 
These  books  are  not  striking  or  remarkable,  but  they  give 
evidence  of  an  observant  eye  and  a  power  of  writing  in  a 
strong,  simple  and  wholesome  manner. 

Mr.  John  Masefield,  although  he  has  since  turned  to 
other  courses,  also  began  as  a  writer  of  sea  stories.     A 

Mainsail  Haul  (1905)  was  a  collection 
John  Masefield.  of  short  tales  of  the  sea.  Lost  Endeavour 

(1910)  and  Jim  Davis  (1911)  are  tales 
of  adventure  in  which  incident  counts  for  more  than 
character.  In  the  same  class  Captain  Margaret  (1908) 
is  a  more  arresting  volume,  for  a  finely  narrated  story 
of  broken  love  is  worked  into  the  romance.  It  is  raised 
above  the  ordinary  tale  of  adventure  by  its  strong 
character-drawing  and  by  the  spirit  of  poetry  which 
illuminates  the  narrative.  And  these  are  the  redeeming 
features  of  Mr.  Masefield' s  first  true  novel,  Multitude  and 
Solitude  (1909),  an  otherwise  exasperating  piece  of  work, 
for  the  story  breaks  into  two  distinct  parts  which  are 
only  dove-tailed  «rudely  and  violently.  In  the  earlier 
half  of  the  book  Mr.  Masefield  tells  the  story  of  a  dramatist 
whose  play  fails,  whose  life  is  further  embittered  by  the 
death  of  the  woman  he  loves  ;  in  the  latter  half  the  hero 
is,  by  a  mechanical  collocation  of  incidents,  engineered 
off  to  Africa  to  study  sleeping  sickness.  Mr.  Mase- 
field's  longest  and  most  ambitious  novel,  The  Street  of 
To-day  (1911),  also  suffers  from  the  intolerable  clumsiness 
of  its  construction.  Lionel  Heseltine  returns  to  London 
from  Africa,  and  mixing  again  in  the  society  of  dainty 
women  realises  that  loneliness  in  bachelor  chambers  is 
not  life.  He  marries,  but  only  to  have  his  wife  leave  him 
because  he  cannot  give  her  what  she  expected.  The  first 
half  of  the  tale  is  heavily  overweighted  with  the  dis- 
cussion of  social  and  political  problems  and  the  story 
moves  slowly  ;  the  second  half,  in  which  we  learn  that 
Heseltine  fails  both  as  a  husband  and  a  magazine  editor, 
is  hurried  through  rapidly.  It  is  evident  that  Mr.  Mase- 
field had  not  planned  his  work  in  either  book.  He  is 
wanting  in  art ;  when  he  begins  to  write  he  does  not  know 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  395 

what  he  is  going  to  say  ;  and  his  staccato,  snipped  style 
makes  no  pretence  to  be  a  pattern  of  good  prose.  In  his 
novels,  as  in  his  verse,  Mr.  Masefield  has  perhaps  come 
far  short  of  what  he  yet  may  do.  His  work  is  breezy, 
full-blooded,  sincere  ;  it  is  also  crude  and  violent.  In 
depth  of  insight  and  in  fidelity  of  observation  he  is  a 
lesser  novelist  than  many  writers  of  the  day  ;  in  Multitude 
and  Solitude  there  is,  on  the  other  hand,  a  spirit  of  poetry 
which  makes  it  a  failure  of  more  value  than  many  a 
success. 

There  are  aspects  in  which  the  novels  of  Mr.  Robert 
Hichens  are  not  unlike  those  of  Mr.  Conrad.     He  com- 
bines elements  of  romance,  of  realism, 
Robert  Smythe  and    the    study    of    motives,    causes 

Hichens,  t>.  1864.  and  mental  phenomena.  When  a 
young  man  he  came  to  London  to 
become  a  student  of  the  Royal  College  of  Music  ;  but 
by  a  happy  inspiration  he  chose  the  moment  when  the 
aesthetic  movement  was  at  its  height  to  publish  a  witty 
and  spirited  satire  upon  its  extravagances.  The  Green 
Carnation  (1894)  was  the  book  of  the  moment  and  a 
popular  success.  It  deserved  its  success,  for  it  was  the 
most  pointed  satire  of  any  length  directed  against  the 
aesthetic  movement.  The  epigrams  and  paradoxes  of 
Esme  Amarinth  are  those  of  Wilde  hardly  veiled.  "  Every- 
thing that  is  true  is  inappropriate  "  has  all  the  ring  of 
Wilde's  manner ;  and  the  length  and  breadth  of  the 
aesthetic  moral  philosophy  is  well  summed-up  in  the 
remark  of  Lady  Locke — "  We  are  to  aim  at  inducing  a 
violent  rash  that  all  the  world  may  stare  at." 

Thenceforward  Mr.  Hichens  was  committed  to  the  path 
of  literature,  and,  diverging  from  his  first  direction,  the 
writing  of  satiric  extravaganza,  he  turned  to  more  thought- 
ful and  serious  work,  till  with  the  most  subtle  and  psycho- 
logically intricate  of  his  books,  A  Spirit  in  Prison  (1908), 
he  exhausted  his  powers,  and  his  later  volumes,  despite 
the  best  efforts  of  the  author,  break  down  under  the 
strain  of  trying  to  catch  the  former  vigour  and  closeness 
of  analysis.  In  Bella  Donna  (1909)  the  fantastic  element 
of  Mr.  Hichens'  imaginative  faculty  overpowers  his  sense 
of  reality  and  proportion,  and  the  narrative  collapses  in 
a  painfully  melodramatic  effort  to  represent  the  glamour 


396  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

of  the  Orient.  But  this  is  to  anticipate,  and  to  pass  over 
a  number  of  exceptionally  strong  and  thoughtful  novels. 
The  Green  Carnation  was  followed  by  An  Imaginative 
Man  (1895),  a  study  in  morbid  pathology  and  a  satire 
upon  the  shams  of  modern  life,  and  The  Folly  of  Eustace 
(1896).  But  the  curious  and  original  Flames  (1897),  a 
story  of  spiritualistic  phenomena  and  psychic  influences, 
was  the  most  remarkable  of  his  earlier  tales.  Felix  (1902) 
illustrates  the  illusions  perdues  of  a  young  Englishman, 
who  is  fired  with  literary  ambitions,  after  meeting  with 
the  tailor  who  once  made  trousers  for  Balzac.  The  book 
is  partly  a  tale  of  the  lost  ideals  of  rose-white  youth, 
and  partly  an  indictment  of  literary  and  social  life  in 
London.  This  and  The  Woman  with  the  Fan  (1904),  a 
well-constructed  book,  are,  compared  with  the  occultism 
of  Flames,  realistic  novels  of  the  common  world.  But  it 
was  between  the  years  1904  and  1908  that  Mr.  Hichens 
reached  his  best  in  craftsmanship,  insight  and  concentra- 
tion with  the  three  long  novels,  The  Garden  of  Allah  (1904), 
The  Call  of  the  Blood  (1906)  and  its  sequel,  A  Spirit  in 
Prison.  In  these  novels,  conscious  that  he  was  beginning 
to  exhaust  his  store  of  observation  of  English  social  life, 
and  anxious  to  study  the  psychology  of  simple,  passionate 
and  unsophisticated  men  and  women,  he  carried  his  scene 
afield  to  Northern  Africa  and  Sicily.  The  Garden  of  Allah 
has  a  double  thread  running  through  its  pages — the 
fascination  of  the  vast  silences  of  the  sandy  desert  and 
the  spell  of  the  Roman  Catholic  faith.  Mr.  Hichens  shows 
himself  an  excellent  topographical  writer  in  these  tales. 

"  They  were  near  Beni-Mora  now.  Its  palms  appeared 
far  off,  and  in  the  midst  of  them  a  snow-white  tower. 
The  Sahara  lay  beyond  and  around  it,  rolling  away 
from  the  foot  of  low,  brown  hills,  that  looked  as  if  they 
had  been  covered  with  a  soft  powder  of  bronze.  .  .  . 
In  this  pageant  of  the  East  she  saw  arise  the  naked 
soul  of  Africa  ;  no  faded,  gentle  thing,  fearful  of  being 
seen,  fearful  of  being  known  and  understood  ;  but  a 
phenomenon  vital,  bold  and  gorgeous,  like  the  sound 
of  a  trumpet  pealing  a  great  reveille.  As  she  looked 
on  this  flaming  land  laid  fearlessly  bare  before  her, 
disdaining  the  clothing  of  grass,  plant  and  flower,  of 


CHAP,  in]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  397 

stream  and  tree,  displaying  itself  with  an  almost  brazen 
insouciance,  confident  in  its  spacious  power,  and  in 
its  golden  pride,  her  heart  leaped  up  as  if  in  answer  to 
a  deliberate  appeal." 

The  desert  in  its  influence  upon  the  heroine  of  Mr.  Hichens' 
stoiy  plays  a  part  comparable  to  Egdon  Heath  in  Mr. 
Hardy's  Return  of  the  Native.  It  governs  the  narrative 
and  moulds  the  characters  of  those  men  and  women  who 
come  in  contact  with  it.  Against  the  sombre  colours  of 
the  desert  is  set  the  somewhat  melodramatic  love-story 
of  an  English  girl  and  a  renegade  Russian  monk.  As 
Boris,  the  monk,  hears  the  call  of  love  and  the  world, 
so  in  The  Call  of  the  Blood  Maurice  Delarey,  half  English, 
half  Sicilian,  is  hurried  by  his  passionate  southern  blood 
into  faithlessness  to  his  wife  and  a  tragic  end.  But  it  is 
in  the  sequel,  A  Spirit  in  Prison,  that  Mr.  Hichens  gives 
us  his  finest  and  closest  work  as  a  student  of  the  mind. 
A  long  novel,  it  is  perfectly  co-ordinated,  and  the  develop- 
ment of  the  theme — the  bondage  of  the  spirit  shielded 
by  a  lie — is  used  with  extraordinary  skill  and  power. 
A  Spirit  in  Prison  is  a  fine  piece  of  writing,  and  immeasur- 
ably Mr.  Hichens'  most  substantial  work.  Bella  Donna 
represented  a  great  falling  off,  and  only  too  evidently 
betrayed  weariness  and  laboured  effort.  In  his  attempt 
to  reproduce  the  atmosphere  of  The  Garden  of  Allah— 
the  spell  of  the  Orient — Mr.  Hichens  became  so  unbalanced 
as  to  suggest  comparison  with  Ouida.  The  Dweller  on  the 
Threshold  (1911)  restored  the  scene  to  England,  and 
reverted  to  the  subject  of  psychic  influence  ;  but,  com- 
pared with  Flames,  it  was  a  brief  and  slight  piece  of 
writing.  The  Fruitful  Vine  (1911)  is  weaker  than  his 
best  writing,  but  it  is  the  one  book  of  the  last  few  years 
which  does  Mr.  Hichens  the  least  discredit.  In  The  Way 
of  Ambition  (1913)  he  tells  cleverly  the  story  of  a  musical 
composer  forced  against  his  will  into  writing  for  success, 
and  his  consequent  downfall.  He  has  a  thorough  know- 
ledge of  his  situations  and  the  many  types  of  people 
whom  he  introduces,  but  the  characters  are  wire-drawn 
and  wanting  in  true  life-likeness. 

Mr.  Hichens'  chief  failing  in  his  more  ambitious  novels 
is   an   absence   of  that   humour   which   he   possessed   in 


398  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

abundance  when  he  wrote  The  Green  Carnation.  In  later 
years  he  takes  himself  too  seriously  and  coldly.  In 
analysis  of  human  character  and  motive  an  intellectual 
egotism  and  aloofness  renders  his  characters  chilling  and 
unsympathetic.  He  cannot  sink  himself  in  the  people 
of  his  imagination.  Even  in  A  Spirit  in  Prison  his  manner 
tends  to  be  intellectually  objective.  On  the  other  hand 
Mr.  Hichens  succeeds  in  uniting  his  narrative  to  the 
broader  and  more  important  issues  of  life  and  the  moral 
workings  of  the  universe.  Flames  exhibits  the  power  of 
mind  upon  mind  for  evil ;  The  Call  of  the  Blood  illustrates 
the  forces  of  heredity  and  unconscious  memory ;  A 
Spirit  in  Prison  and  The  Fruitful  Vine  point  the  moral 
of  the  revenge  exacted  by  circumstance  for  falsehood  even 
in  a  good  cause.  These  are  motives  patient  of  great 
dramatic  treatment,  and  Mr.  Hichens  has  the  instincts 
of  the  dramatist.  But  his  work  is  inexplicably  unequal 
in  its  quality.  Felix  is  slight  in  invention,  thought  and 
treatment  compared  with  work  that  went  before  ;  The 
Dweller  on  the  Threshold  makes  a  surprisingly  lame  use 
of  a  subject — psychic  influences — which  the  author  had 
used  already  with  far  greater  power  in  Flames ;  and 
Bella  Donna  drops  to  the  grotesque  when  contrasted  with 
The  Garden  of  Allah.  If  Mr.  Hichens  had  not  reasserted 
himself  with  The  Fruitful  Vine  it  would  be  natural  to  say 
that  he  had  completely  written  himself  out  in  1908,  the 
year  of  his  greatest,  his  most  complex  and  his  most  con- 
vincing novel  in  the  exposition  of  character — A  Spirit 
in  Prison.  Among  English  novels  written  within  this 
century  this  book,  in  its  close  analysis  of  character  and 
motive,  in  the  poetry  of  its  background,  and  in  the  breadth 
with  which  Mr.  Hichens  outlines  his  moral  drama,  stands 
out  as  a  noble  and  distinctive  achievement. 

Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett  finds  his  strongest  inspiration  in 
the  past  and  in  books  ;    he  is  an  historical  romancer,  but 

a  romancer  with  qualifications.  In  his 
Maurice  Hewlett,  verse  he  has  made  peculiarly  his  own 
b.  1861.  the  reinterpretation  of  classical  myth, 

and  in  prose  he  is  equally  identified 
with  a  distinctive  and  original  sphere  of  work  in  his  six 
or  seven  volumes  of  mediaeval  romance.  Beside  these, 
however,  he  has  written  miscellaneous  prose  and  fiction 


CHAP,  in]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  399 

of  an  entirely  different  order.  His  prose  books  readily 
fall  into  four  classes.  Earthwork  out  of  Tuscany  (1895) 
and  one  or  two  other  volumes  are  topographical ;  The 
Forest  Lovers  (1898),  Little  Novels  of  Italy  (1899),  Richard 
Yea-and-Nay  (1900),  Brazenhead  the  Great  (1911)  and  The 
Song  of  Renny  (1911)  are  romances  of  mediaeval  Europe  ; 
The  Fool  Errant  (1905),  The  Stooping  Lady  (1907)  and 
Mrs.  Lancelot  (1912)  are  mannered  and  prec.ose  romances 
of  love  in  the  eighteenth  or  early  nineteenth  centuries  ; 
the  trilogy,  Half-way  House  (1908),  The  Open  Country 
(1909)  and  Rest  Harrow  (1910),  is  a  comedy  of  modern  life. 
It  was  first  with  The  Forest  Lovers,  a  romance  strikingly 
original  in  style,  that  Mr.  Hewlett  won  recognition.  The 
story  of  the  wandering  knight  and  the  peasant  girl  is  of 
less  account  than  the  wider  conception  of  the  book,  an 
attempt  to  resuscitate  and  paint  vividly  the  humour, 
the  tragedy  and  the  spectacle  of  the  Middle  Age.  The 
exquisite  poetry  of  the  setting,  the  elaborate  and  closely- 
woven  style  of  many  colours  win  upon  the  reader.  But 
beautiful  as  The  Forest  Lovers  may  be  accounted  as  a 
poem,  the  sugared  manner  soon  cloys,  and  the  volume 
will  scarcely  bear  re-reading.  We  admire  it  once  as  a 
special  feat  of  skill  in  a  difficult  kind  of  work  ;  but  it  is 
not  a  book  to  live  with.  In  style  Richard  Yea-and-Nay 
is  les;  ornate  and  inwoven;  and  Mr.  Hewlett's  imagina- 
tive re-creation  of  the  character  of  Richard  Cceur  de  Lion 
and  the  spirit  of  the  Crusades  illustrates  his  genuine 
historical  faculty.  The  ground  of  nearly  all  his  work 
is  scholarship  and  historical  instinct.  Brazenhead  the 
Great  and  The  Song  of  Renny  are  romances  not  in  any 
marked  way  differentiated  from  his  earlier  essays  in  the 
same  manner.  But  his  greatest  success  in  this  genre  is 
in  the  short  stories  of  the  Little  Novels  of  Italy,  in  the  New 
Canterbury  Tales  (1901)  and  in  The  Queen's  Quair  (1904), 
that  splendid  historical  painting  of  a  later  period.  In 
historical  romance  Mr.  Hewlett  has  done  nothing  else 
as  simple,  sincere  and  living  as  this  sympathetic  inter- 
pretation of  Mary,  Queen  of  Scots,  and  her  tragedy.  And, 
if  sometimes  a  little  overwrought  and  precious,  several  of 
the  short  tales  of  the  other  volumes,  especially  the  exquisite 
'  Madonna  of  the  Peach  Tree,'  could  not  in  grace  and 
sentiment  be  bettered.  In  these  stories  Mr.  Hewlett 


400  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

paints  the  landscape,  the  cities  and  the  pageantry  of  the 
Middle  Age  with  a  realism  and  truth  of  colour  which  is 
both  beautiful  and  convincing.  The  description  of  Padua 
in  '  Ippolita  in  the  Hills  '  is  an  example  of  perfect  writing 
in  the  combination  of  brevity  with  wealth  of  content. 

"  Padua  is  a  city  set  in  meadows  full  of  light ;  it  is 
well-spaced,  plentifully  watered,  arcaded,  green  with 
gardens.  The  streets  are  like  cloister-walks ;  as  in 
Lucca,  the  plane  is  the  sacred  tree,  and  next  to  that 
flag  of  green  on  a  silver  staff,  the  poplar  shows  the 
city  blushful  in  the  spring  and  thrilling  all  summer 
with  the  memory.  It  is  a  place  of  brick  and  marble, 
painted  orange,  brown,  yellow  and  warm  white,  where 
every  corner-stone  and  every  twig  is  printed  sharply 
on  a  sky  of  morning  blue. 

'  Quivi  le  mura  son  fatte  con  arte 
Che  parlano,  e  rispondono  a  i  parlanti.' 

A  tale  of  Padua  should  have  the  edge  of  a  cut  gem." 

And  all  these  tales  are  like  stones  beautifully  cut  and  set. 
Mr.  Hewlett  is  not  a  full-blooded  romancer.  A  pretty 
sentiment,  a  quaint  turn  of  phrase,  a  delicate  colouring 
of  poetry  and  adventure,  a  hinted  voluptas  and  a  style 
thick-woven  like  old  tapestry,  these  are  the  components 
of  his  romance.  And  he  sometimes  seeks  to  create  an 
archaic  atmosphere  by  the  use  of  cheap  artifices  in  style 
which  Scott  and  Dumas  had,  in  general,  the  good  sense 
to  avoid. 

"  He  saw  a  table,  a  chair,  and  a  bowl  full  of  white 
substance,  stiff  and  glistening.  '  Sit  down  and  take 
your  filling  of  it,'  said  Myrrha.  Gervase  put  his  fingers 
into  the  bowl  and  sucked  the  tips  of  them. 

"  '  It  is  the  same  you  had  in  your  pocket,'  he  says  ; 
then  sat  down  and  ate  some  of  the  stuff.  It  had  a  very 
sweet  sharp  taste  and  was  pungent  in  the  nose.  He 
ate  for  a  time,  but  sparingly." 

In  this  short  passage  Mr.  Hewlett  tries  to  make  the  style 
suggest  something  other  than  modern  English  by  a  few 
little  tricks  which  might  well  have  been  left.  Not  to 
write  modern  English  is  not  necessarily  to  invest  narrative 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  401 

with  a  mediaeval  atmosphere.  Mr.  Hewlett  writes  "  Take 
your  filling  "  for  "  Eat  your  fill,"  he  writes,  "  The  same 
you  had  "  for  "  The  same  as  you  had,"  and  describes  a 
smell  as  "  pungent  in  "  instead  of  "  pungent  to  "  the 
nose.  From  these  little  twists  it  is  not  a  far  road  to  the 
larding  of  the  narrative  with  impossible  mediaeval  oaths, 
the  dressing  of  characters  in  hosen  and  shoon,  and  the 
rest  of  the  romancer's  stock-in-trade.  If  we  are  com- 
pelled, however,  to  cavil  at  minor  points,  the  intrinsic 
beauty  and  art  of  these  tales  there  is  no  disclaiming.  They 
are  aglow  with  the  passion  and  pageantry  of  life. 

As  a  painter  of  individual  characters  Mr.  Hewlett 
has  done  better  work  in  his  romances  of  a  later  historical 
epoch.  The  Stooping  Lady  is,  whether  consciously  or 
unconsciously,  so  bare-facedly  written  in  Meredithese  that 
we  are  left  in  doubt  whether  this  is  the  sincere  admiration 
of  imitation  or  parody.  But  in  Mrs.  Lancelot  Mr.  Hewlett 
writes  independently  and  gives  life  to  his  characters. 
Mrs.  Lancelot  and  the  men  who  play  a  part  in  her  story, 
the  Prime  Minister,  her  husband,  her  poet-lover  are 
creatures  of  flesh  and  blood.  Poetry,  breathing  life,  and 
the  subtle  study  of  the  clash  of  character  with  character 
all  mark  Mrs.  Lancelot  as,  in  truth  and  realism,  Mr. 
Hewlett's  best  book.  The  chief  characters,  historical  and 
fictitious,  of  this  tale  are  re-introduced  in  Bendish  (1913), 
a  story  told  in  the  same  mannered  and  deliberate  way. 
As  fiction  the  book  is  less  successful,  for  the  historical 
figures  consort  ill  with  the  fictitious.  It  would  have  been 
better  to  give  Bendish  his  name  in  history — Byron. 

The  three  comedies  of  modern  life,  Half-way  House, 
The  Open  Country  and  Rest  Harrow  show  that  Mr.  Hewlett 
can  desert  historical  romance  and  write  comedy  in  narrative 
of  the  present  time.  But  apart  from  the  single  character 
of  Senhouse,  gentleman  vagabond,  travelling  with  cart, 
tent  and  pony,  these  comedies  would  be  tame  and  feature- 
less. Senhouse  is  the  making  of  the  trilogy,  and  one  of 
the  most  attractive  personalities  in  modern  fiction.  For 
the  rest  Mr.  Hewlett  does  not  achieve  anything  which 
Meredith  and  Henry  James  have  not  done  better  before 
him.  His  comedies  move  stiffly  and  awkwardly,  and  do 
not  suggest  a  source  in  the  experience  of  a  clear  and  eager 
observer  of  common  life. 
2  D 


402  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Mr.  Hewlett's  prose,  like  his  verse,  is  the  work  of  a 
scholar,  a  student,  a  man  of  letters,  but  it  is  wanting  in 
naturalness.  The  marks  of  chisel  and  plane  and  the 
measurements  of  the  foot-rule  are  left  too  plainly  upon 
it.  The  supreme  test  of  the  novelist's  art  is  its  closeness 
to  ordinary  human  nature  ;  and,  judged  by  this  test,  Mr. 
Hewlett  betrays  serious  limitations.  Nevertheless  his 
mastery  of  style,  his  literary  allusiveness,  the  glow  of 
romance  with  which  he  invests  his  narrative,  and  his 
fine  historical  sense,  render  it  impossible  to  exclude  him 
from  any  half-dozen  of  the  first  chosen  from  English 
writers  to-day. 

Two  other  novelists,  gifted  with  a  strong  historical 
sense,  may  here  be  mentioned  briefly,  Sir  Henry 
Newbolt,  the  poet,  and  Robert  Hugh 
Sir  Henry  John  Benson.  These  two  writers  use  the 
Newbolt,  b.  1862.  historical  setting  of  their  tales  to  carry 
a  moral  and  religious  lesson ;  for  Mr. 
Hewlett  the  past  is  no  more  than  a  pageant  and  a  poem. 
Sir  Henry  Newbolt' s  first  prose-book,  Taken  from  the 
Enemy  (1892),  is  an  unpretentious  story  of  a  plot  hatched 
in  England  to  liberate  Napoleon  from  St.  Helena,  and  its 
failure  caused  by  the  death  of  the  Emperor  just  before 
the  plot  is  consummated.  Fourteen  years  passed  before 
he  published  a  second  novel,  The  Old  Country  (1906) ; 
and  this  was  followed  by  The  New  June  (1909)  and  The 
Twymans  (1911).  The  three  are  bound  together  by  their 
single  theme — the  continuity  of  history.  The  Old  Country 
carries  an  epigraph  from  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  beginning, 
"  In  Eternity  there  is  no  distinction  of  Tenses  "  ;  and  the 
romance,  based  upon  the  translation  of  a  modern  man 
into  fourteenth-century  England,  is  a  tractate  upon  the 
unchanging  nature  of  men's  ideals  and  hopes,  despite 
changes  in  the  externals  of  life.  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  is 
conservative  in  his  sympathies,  and  believes  with  one  of 
the  characters  of  his  romance  that  "  man's  highest  hope 
can  be  nothing  if  it  be  not  itself  a  memory."  The  New 
June  is  another  romance  of  mediaeval  England,  and  an 
exposition  of  the  same  creed.  The  Twymans,  although 
a  tale  of  the  present  day,  is  one  more  illustration  of  his 
historic  faith.  It  relates  the  fortunes  of  his  hero  in  a 
public  school  and  at  the  university ;  and  the  tale  is 


CHAP,  m]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  403 

permeated  with  the  belief  that  the  best  moral  instincts 
of  the  English  race  are  bound  up  with  the  noble  tradition 
of  corporate  life  at  school  and  college.  In  simple  and  good 
English,  in  a  vein  of  poetry,  as  we  might  expect,  these 
romances  do  not  fail ;  but  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  is  no  story- 
teller, his  plots  are  of  the  slightest,  their  development 
confused  and  uncertain,  and  his  characters  are  thinly 
sketched.  His  range  of  thought  is  so  limited,  his  treat- 
ment of  his  themes  often  so  jejune,  that,  despite  his 
reverence  for  style  and  his  sense  of  literary  responsibility, 
in  prose  he  goes  no  further  than  in  verse.  He  hardly  ever 
writes  to  kindle  the  imagination. 

R.  H.  Benson  had  powers  of  imagination,  mystical 
insight  and  a  fine  style,  and  since  his  conversion  to  the 
Church  of  Rome  he  assiduously  de- 
Robert  Hugh  voted  these  gifts  to  her  service.  Besides 
Benson,  1871-1914.  writing  devotional  and  religious  works, 
in  novels  such  as  By  What  Authority 
(1904)  and  The  Queen's  Tragedy  (1906),  he  combated  the 
Protestant  view  of  history.  He  had  the  instinct  of  the 
scholar  and  historian  and  the  gift  of  style.  In  the  vigour 
of  his  imagination  and  in  native  literary  genius  he  stood 
above  his  brothers,  Mr.  E.  F.  Benson  and  Mr.  A.  C. 
Benson  ;  but  the  dialectician  and  the  proselytizer  over- 
powered the  artist  and  often  led  him  into  exaggeration 
and  sensationalism.  Had  his  mind  and  imagination  been 
set  free  he  might  have  written  prose-fiction  of  wider  range 
and  greater  distinction. 

Anthony  Hope  (Sir  Anthony  Hope  Hawkins)  may, 
perhaps,  be  placed  with  the  romantic  writers,  for,  though 
few  have  surpassed  him  in  the  delineation 
Anthony  Hope,  of  modern  social  life,  he  can  scarcely  be 
b.  1863.  counted  with  the  realists  in  the  stricter 

sense,  and  it  was  first  as  a  writer  of  un- 
diluted romance  that  he  won  fame.  Before  he  had 
resigned  his  practice  at  the  Bar  he  published  his  first 
novel,  A  Man  of  Mark  (1890)  ;  but  it  was  not  till  he 
wrote  the  The  Prisoner  of  Zenda  (1894),  the  romance  of 
a  purely  imaginary  principality  in  South  Germany,  that 
he  became  a  popular  author.  In  the  same  year  he  pro- 
duced his  fascinating  Dolly  Dialogues,  presenting  the 
conversations  of  a  lady  with  the  man  she  has  jilted.  Wit, 


404  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

in  the  better  sense  of  that  word,  Anthony  Hope  does  not 
possess,  but  he  has  a  singularly  light  and  deft  touch ; 
and  these  dialogues  illustrate  his  power  to  observe  and 
render  back  the  inconsequent  phases  and  manners  of 
social  life.  It  is  in  this  faculty  that  Anthony  Hope  need 
fear  no  rival  among  his  contemporaries.  For  over  twenty 
years  he  has  written  stories  often  remote  from  every- 
day life,  but  he  has  shown  a  continuous  tendency  to 
approximate  to  things  as  they  are.  The  God  in  the  Car 
(1894)  contains  skilful  dialogue  and  relates  the  not  very 
credible  fortunes  of  a  company  promoter  in  South  Africa. 
Rupert  of  Hentzau  (1898)  continued  the  artificial  romance 
of  The  Prisoner  of  Zenda.  In  the  rapid  succession  of  his 
later  novels,  including,  among  others,  The  Intrusions  of 
Peggy  (1902)  and  The  Indiscretion  of  the  Duchess  (1904) 
Anthony  Hope  never  fails  in  skilful  technique,  apt  dialogue 
and  a  ready  ease  in  handling  his  characters,  which  make 
him  an  attractive  and  popular  writer  with  something  yet 
in  reserve.  In  Quisante  (1900)  he  showed  his  powers  to 
the  best  advantage.  Here  he  essayed  to  study  realistically 
the  interplay  of  opposed  characters.  Quisante,  the  rough- 
grained,  half-cultured  political  adventurer  has  little  to 
recommend  him  save  great  intellectual  powers  and  a 
commanding  will.  A  lady  of  aristocratic  birth  and  gentle 
nurture,  fascinated  by  his  personality,  marries  him,  only 
to  discover  the  painful  incongruity  of  her  position.  The 
plot-idea  is  more  ambitious  than  in  the  earlier  tales  ;  and, 
although  he  never  ceases  to  be  the  light-hearted  and 
graceful  entertainer,  Anthony  Hope  gradually  inclines  to 
produce  an  approximation  to  the  problem  novel.  Mrs. 
Maxon  Protests  (1911)  is  an  example  in  point.  The 
vivacious  Mrs.  Maxon  discovers  the  ailment  of  incom- 
patibility with  her  husband.  She  leaves  him,  and  later 
unites  her  lot  with  that  of  another  man,  only  to  meet 
with  fresh  disillusions  ;  and  in  the  conclusion  nothing  is 
concluded  save  that  Mrs.  Maxon  realises  there  are  more 
things  than  were  dreamed  of  in  her  philosophy  !of  emanci- 
pation. The  whole  book  is  cleverly  conceived  and  bril- 
liantly written. 

If  Anthony  Hope  hasfpften  been  satisfied  merely  to 
entertain,  he$is  an  excellent  raconteur  and  a  master  of 
sparkling  dialogue.  His  style  is  both  easy  and  good, 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  405 

his  touch  is  graceful  and  light,  he  has  a  wholesome  cleanli- 
ness in  thought  and  subject  matter.  He  has  never 
attempted  great  things  ;  but  he  is  one  of  the  best  living 
painters  of  the  lighter  side  of  English  social  life. 

Anthony  Hope,  although  he  does  not  take  himself  with 
the  solemn  earnestness  of  many  of  his  countrymen  is 
unmistakably  English  in  his  outlook 
William  John  Locke,  upon  life.  Mr.  W.  J.  Locke,  who 
b.  1863.  shares  certain  of  Anthony  Hope's  gifts 

as  a  writer,  is  as  emphatically  French 
in  temper.  His  irony,  his  lack  of  solemnity,  the  nuance 
of  his  sceptical  satire  belong  to  the  genius  of  a  people 
which  has  produced  a  M.  Anatole  France.  Sir  Marcus 
Ordeyne,  the  virtuoso,  the  book-collector,  the  cultured 
recluse  and  ironic  philosopher,  might  conceivably  have 
been  imagined  by  the  greatest  of  living  French  writers. 
Mr.  Locke's  temper  is  un-English ;  he  knows  the  French 
and  their  language  almost  as  a  native,  and  he  delights 
to  place  the  scenes  of  his  tales  in  France. 

For  ten  years  or  more  he  wrote  novels  without  drawing 
attention  to  himself,  nor  was  his  early  work  worthy  of 
remark,  save  as  an  average  example  of  good  melodrama. 
The  generous  hero  takes  upon  himself  the  sins  of  others 
and  lives  a  dilapidated,  a  vagrant  and  a  Bohemian  life 
—this  is  the  common  formula,  and  Mr.  Locke  does  not 
desert  it  in  his  later  and  better  books.  For  in  the  reserves 
of  melodrama  Mr.  Locke  continues  to  dwell.  He  is  not 
the  serious  student  of  work-a-day  life  ;  and  were  it  not 
for  his  admirable  style,  his  delicate  irony,  his  insouciant 
gaiety,  his  tales  would  scarcely  call  for  mention.  But 
Mr.  Locke  is  of  interest  among  English  writers  as  the 
best  example  of  French  irony  translated  to  these  shores. 
The  inconsequence  of  his  narrative  and  the  looseness  of 
his  form  are  purely  English. 

Before  the  appearance  of  The  Morals  of  Marcus  Ordeyne 
(1905)  he  had  written  eight  books.  Typical  of  these  early 
melodramas  are  At  the  Gate  of  Samaria  (1895),  Idols  (1899) 
and  Where  Love  Is  (1903).  It  was  not,  however,  till  he 
wrote  the  first-named  book  that  he  gave  distinctive  proof 
of  literary  power  ;  and  in  dramatised  form  the  novel 
met  with  great  success.  From  a  writer  almost  unknown 
he  became  one  of  the  most  popular  and  best-selling  authors 


406  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

of  the  day.  The  substance  of  his  narratives  still  remained 
as  far  from  reality  as  in  his  early  melodramas  ;  but  the 
excellence  of  his  style,  his  wit  and  urbane  irony  conspire 
to  seduce  our  interest  in  the  characters  of  his  tales  and 
release  us  from  the  necessity  of  judging  his  truth  to  nature. 
For,  despite  his  rare  literary  gifts,  Mr.  Locke  has  little 
sense  of  responsibility  and  no  sincerity  of  intention.  As 
a  reaction  against  the  commonplace  world  he  enjoys 
writing  of  la  vie  de  Bohcme  ;  and  he  is  a  skilled  enter- 
tainer, for  he  can  hold  our  interest  in  his  characters  from 
moment  to  moment  and  afford  to  neglect  his  story.  The 
situation  in  The  Morals  of  Marcus  Ordeyne  is  whimsical 
and  wholly  improbable,  but  it  is,  at  the  least,  amusing. 
Sir  Marcus  Ordeyne,  baronet  and  literary  recluse,  piciks 
up  in  the  streets  of  London  Carlotta,  who  has  escaped 
from  a  harem  in  Alexandretta. 

Mr.  Locke  followed  Marcus  Ordeyne  with  his  master- 
work,  The  Beloved  Vagabond  (1906),  slight,  but  one  of  the 
most  delightful  and  charming  essays  in  fiction  of  recent 
years.  The  old  formula  of  the  man  unfairly  ostracised 
by  society  is  used,  and  the  shabby,  dirty,  drunken,  happy- 
go-lucky,  erudite  vagabond,  Berzelias  Nibbidad  Paragot, 
is  a  figure  of  contrasts,  genius,  wisdom  and  hopeless  moral 
delinquency,  as  strange  as  Falstaff  s  self ;  and  every 
right-minded  person  will  feel  that  the  world  has  need 
not  only  of  its  sober,  righteous  and  industrious  citizens, 
but  also  of  its  Falstaffs  and  Paragots.  The  story  of 
Paragot's  vagrancy  with  Asticot,  the  boy,  and  Blanquette 
de  Veau,  the  peasant  girl,  soon  fades  from  the  memory  ; 
the  tale  is  nought,  but  the  personality  of  the  whimsical, 
great-hearted,  Quixotic  tramp  is  unforgettable.  It  matters 
little  whether  Paragot  might  or  might  not  have  been :  in 
the  kingdom  of  fanciful  imagination  he  is  a  notable  figure. 

Unfortunately  Mr.  Locke  has  written  nothing  since  so 
good.  His  humour  and  jesting  irony  have  never  again 
been  so  companionable.  His  books  have  always  been 
entertaining  ;  but  fancifulness  has  become  a  strain  and 
a  labour ;  his  readiness  has  begun  to  fail  him.  The 
incidents  which  go  to  the  making  of  Septimus  (1909)  are 
the  same,  and  the  plot,  such  as  it  is,  is  adopted  with  the 
necessary  modifications  from  The  Beloved  Vagabond ; 
but  invention  is  weaker  and  the  characters  want  the  reality 


CHAF.  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  40? 

of  those  in  the  earlier  book.  Septimus  reads  like  a  tale 
made  by  rote  for  serial  publication,  the  form  in  which 
it  first  appeared.  Simon  the  Jester  (1910),  with  its 
loves  of  the  man  condemned  by  the  doctors  to  an  early 
death  and  of  the  woman  trainer  of  wild  beasts,  is  riotous 
extravaganza.  The  Glory  of  Clementina  Wing  (1911)  is 
better,  and  Clementina,  the  disillusioned,  untidy  Bohemian 
artist  of  genius  is  one  of  the  most  sincere  and  credible  of 
Mr.  Locke's  characterisations.  The  Joyous  Adventures 
of  Aristide  Pujol  (1912)  scarcely  calls  for  mention  save 
as  an  excellent  example  of  picaresque  romance  in  modern 
times ;  Stella  Maris  (1913),  which  has  for  theme  the 
relationship  of  the  adult  and  the  child,  is  washed  in 
sentimentality  ;  The  Fortunate  Youth  (1914)  is  an  extra- 
vagant tale  of  rise  to  success. 

Mr.  Locke  was  once  capable  of  better  tilings  than  he 
has  ever  done.  His  style  is  a  delight ;  he  has  wit,  culture, 
a  wide  knowledge  of  human  life  and  human  types  in 
different  parts  of  the  world.  But  he  has  chosen  the  less 
excellent  way  of  popularity.  And  his  invention  is  weak  : 
his  plots  are  monotonous  and  his  characters  unreal.  Style, 
a  caustic  irony  and  that  kind  of  nimble  fancy  which 
produces  good  farcical  opera  are  his  native  gifts. 

Alfred  Ollivant  is  one  of  that  group  of  English  writers, 
increasing  each  decade,  whose  genius  is  recognised  in  the 
United    States    before    they    are    much 
Alfred  Ollivant,       heard  of  in  their  native  country.     Owd 
b.  1874.  Bob,   published  in   1898,   waited  nearly 

ten  years  before  its  striking  power  was 
recognised  in  England,  although  in  an  earlier  and  less 
finished  form,  as  Bob,  Son  of  Battle,  it  had  long  been 
accepted  by  American  readers  and  critics  as  one  of  the 
strongest  and  most  original  novels  of  recent  times.  To 
say  of  Owd  Bob  that  it  is  the  best  story  of  canine  life 
ever  written  does  not  debar  us  from  adding  that  it  is 
also  but  little  behind  Mr.  Hardy  in  its  pictures  of  rough 
life  and  homespun  character.  It  is  a  work  of  sincere 
and  sympathetic  observation,  of  splendid  imagination  and 
of  poetical  genius.  From  Dr.  John  Brown's  Rab  and  his 
Friends  (1858),  through  Bret  Harte  to  Jack  London,  the 
story  of  the  dog  has  gone  its  way  ;  but  all  canine  tales 
that  went  before  are  secondary  to  the  story  of  Owd  Bob, 


408  THE  NOVEL  [PART  IV 

the  grey  dog  of  Kenmuir.  In  its  mingling  of  tenderness, 
pathos  and  strength,  in  its  poetry,  in  its  nervous  and 
vigorous  style  the  book  is  immediately  distinguished  from 
the  ordinary  novel  of  the  day.  Shepherds,  sheep-dogs 
and  grey  fells — these  are  the  material  of  Mr.  Ollivant's 
story,  and  with  these  he  writes  his  epic  of  the  tail-less 
tyke  that  sinned  the  unforgivable  sin  of  sheep-murder, 
of  M'Adam,  his  puny,  vindictive  little  master,  and  of  the 
gentle  and  chivalrous  grey  dog  who  fought  the  black 
killer  in  the  wide  silence  of  the  moors.  There  is  a  fine 
dramatic  sequence  in  the  events,  beauty  in  the  passages 
descriptive  of  nature  ;  and  in  the  natural  force  with 
which  he  writes  dialect  Mr.  Ollivant  shows  a  rare  literary 
talent.  As  a  first  novel  it  is  a  more  than  remarkable 
piece  of  work  ;  and  this  strong  book  was  written  by  a 
young  man  physically  injured  and  lying  in  pain. 

It  was  to  be  expected  that  Mr.  Ollivant  should  continue 
with  another  dog  story,  and  Danny  (1902)  appeared  after 
four  years,  only  to  be  withdrawn  and  published  in  the 
following  year  in  a  revised  form.  Even  in  its  better  dress 
Danny  is  disappointingly  inferior  to  Owd  Bob  ;  the  story 
is  slight  and  conventional,  and  concerns  human  beings 
more  than  the  canine  hero.  It  is  not,  like  its  predecessor, 
an  independent  and  original  book.  There  is  some  exquisite 
writing,  and  passages  of  true  and  tender  pathos  ;  but 
whereas  in  Owd  Bob  the  glow  of  imagination  made  the 
whole  more  than  the  parts,  we  remember  the  second  story 
by  excerpts  rather  than  as  a  whole. 

After  this  Mr.  Ollivant  began  to  experiment,  and  each 
successive  book  has  been  a  trial  of  skill  in  an  entirely 
different  field.  The  Redcoat  Captain  (1907),  written  in  a 
curious,  staccato  baby-language,  suggests  a  nonsense- 
book  upon  a  first  reading  of  its  opening  pages.  It  is, 
in  truth,  a  thoughtful  and  often  very  beautiful  allegory 
of  life's  meaning.  It  is  the 

"  only  one  Story,  and  it  is  the  best  story  in  the  world  ; 
but  it  is  not  finished  yet,  and  never  will  be. 

"  And  this  story  grows  better  and  better  all  the  time, 
which  is  how  we  know  it  from  the  written  stories  that 
we  read. 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  409 

"  For  no  story  really  ends  sadly  for  the  very  good 
reason  that  it  can't. 

"  For  Love  is  Love,  and  in  the  end  of  all  Love  must 
win." 

Mr.  Ollivant  wrote  in  a  not  dissimilar  staccato  manner 
his  next  book,  The  Gentleman  (1908),  a  story  of  England  - 
in  1805  and  an  attempt  to  abduct  Nelson.  The  romance 
flows  swiftly  through  a  series  of  kaleidoscopic  scenes  of 
war,  peril  and  bloodshed.  The  Taming  of  John  Blunt 
(1911)  is  the  least  distinctive  and  individual  of  Mr. 
Ollivant' s  books.  The  unconventional  wanderer,  who  is 
by  hypothesis  a  gentleman,  spasmodically  a  man  of  letters, 
constitutionally  a  Socialist,  and  his  experiences  with  well- 
bred  ladies  who  are  at  first  a  little  alarmed  by  his  uncouth 
dress  and  talk,  is  by  no  means  a  new  situation.  John 
Blunt  is  cousin  to  Mr.  Hewlett's  Senhouse,  and  in  melo- 
drama he  would  not  always  be  an  incongruous  figure. 
Far  better  is  The  Royal  Road  (1912),  in  which,  once  again, 
Mr.  Ollivant  entirely  changes  his  milieu  and  paints  the 
life  of  the  working  classes  in  the  mean  streets  of  London. 
The  book  is  a  signal  example  of  the  author's  versatility, 
for  both  in  humour  and  truthfulness  he  rivals  Mr.  Arthur 
Morrison  and  Mr.  Pett  Ridge  on  their  own  ground. 

The  long  interval  of  silence  which  followed  Mr.  Ollivant' s 
first  book  suggested  that  he  was  to  be  known  only  by 
one  volume.  But  since  1907  he  has  continued  to  write, 
not  rapidly,  yet  continuously,  and  he  has  refused  to 
repeat  himself.  In  each  tale  he  has  chosen  different 
settings  and  characters.  Fortunately  or  unfortunately, 
however,  his  first  book  has  overshadowed  the  others. 
None  of  his  later  novels  has  been  as  independent,  original, 
powerful  and  dramatic  ;  and  his  name  will  always  be 
associated  with  the  prose  epic  of  the  tail-less  tyke  and 
the  brave  yet  gentle  grey  dog  of  Kenmuir. 

The  novel  is  patient  and  long-suffering  ;  like  a  good 
traveller  it  adapts  itself  to  circumstance,  and  in  every 
place  is  soon  at  home.  Whatever  the  changes  in  fashion 
it  must  endure  ;  and  it  wears  the  clothes  of  one  season 
as  readily  as  another.  Of  all  forms  of  the  literary  art 
it  is  the  most  vulnerable  and  the  least  able  to  defend  itself 
against  unfair  attacks  or  prying  inquisitiveness.  It  is 
easy  for  the  poet,  the  essayist,  the  journalist,  the  critic 


410  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

to  guard  against  the  ennui  of  his  leisure  by  writing  and 
publishing  an  occasional  novel.  There  are  thus  many 
novels,  of  greater  or  less  merit,  written  by  those  who  are 
not  by  profession  novelists,  novels  which  can  be  classed 
under  no  distinctive  heading  ;  they  are  by  turns  romantic, 
realistic,  didactic,  fantastic,  grotesque,  brilliant  and  dull. 
But  the  novel,  like  every  work  of  man's  hands,  is  exacting ; 
and  the  great  novels  have  been  written  by  men  who  were 
first  novelists  and  afterwards  poets,  essayists  or  leisured 
men  about  town.  It  will  not,  however,  be  out  of  place 
to  note  more  briefly  the  work  in  fiction  of  a  few  modern 
writers  who  do  not  treat  the  novel  as  the  occupation  of  a 
lifetime.  And  among  writers  of  this  class  are  naturally 
to  be  named  Mr.  G.  S.  Street,  Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc,  Mr.  G.  K. 
Chesterton,  Saki  and  Mr.  E.  V.  Lucas. 

Mr.  G.  S.  Street  is  best  described  as  a  man  of  letters. 
He    was    a    contributor    to    Henley's    National   Observer 

and  a  more  than  ordinarily  good 
George  Slythe  writer  of  that  type  of  essay  known  as 
Street,  b.  1867.  "  middles."  Mr.  Street's  essays,  in  their 

urbanity,  readableness  and  in  the  wide 
knowledge  of  good  literature  they  display  are  among 
the  best  of  our  day.  He  has  collected  a  number  in 
Miniatures  and  Moods  (1893),  Quales  Ego  (1896),  Some 
Notes  of  a  Struggling  Genius  (1898),  People  and  Questions 
(1910)  and  On  Money  and  Other  Matters  (1914).  In  The 
Autobiography  of  a  Boy  (1894)  he  wrote  a  moderately 
successful  satire  upon  the  sestheticism  of  Wilde  and  his 
followers.  In  1905  his  comedy,  Great  Friends,  was  pro- 
duced by  the  Stage  Society.  And  upon  the  death  of  Mr. 
Brookfield  in  1913  he  was  appointed  to  be  an  Examiner 
of  Plays.  He  has  also  written  short  stories  and  two  novels. 
Mr.  Street  is  therefore  versatile  and  a  writer  of  parts. 
The  Wise  and  the  Wayward  (1897),  his  first  novel,  was  a 
satire  upon  those  useless  members  of  society  who  dally 
ignobly  with  life.  The  Trials  of  the  Bantocks  (1900),  his 
second  novel,  is  again  sustained  satire,  and  modelled  upon 
the  pattern  of  Thackeray's  Snob  Papers.  The  Bantocks 
are  a  family  typical  of  middle-class  English  snobbery, 
and  the  trials  they  endure  are  the  severe  shocks  their 
snobbishness  receives.  Thackeray's  Snob  Papers  grow 
sometimes  monotonous  ;  of  Mr.  Street's  book  it  may  be 


CHAP,  in]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  411 

said  that  the  vigour  and  humour  of  his  satire  hardly 
falter  for  a  page.  But  Mr.  Street  is  an  essayist  rather  than 
a  consecutive  writer ;  and  his  only  book  which  may 
fairly  be  called  a  novel,  The  Wise  and  the  Wayward,  is 
one  of  his  least  successful  efforts.  He  has  style,  satirical 
humour  and  the  genius  of  the  born  critic,  and  these  stand 
him  in  good  stead  in  the  miscellaneous  essays  and  in 
The  Trials  of  the  Bantocks,  where  he  is  at  his  best. 

Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc  is  with  Mr.  Street  one  of  the  most 
vigorous  and  effective  of  our  living  satirists  ;  and  Mr. 
Belloc  is  the  more  imaginative,  the  more 
Hilaire  Belloc,  witty  and  the  more  purposeful  satirist 
b.  1870.  of  the  two.  His  first  novel  of  any  length, 

Emmanuel  Burden  (1904),  satirises  aspects 
of  British  commercial  enterprise,  religious  polemics,  news- 
paper syndicates  and  other  topical  matters.  The  make- 
believe,  the  pretence  of  unconsciousness  in  implication,  the 
brevity  and  terseness  of  the  satiric  thrusts  often  recall  the 
manner  of  Swift.  Mr.  Clutterbuck' s  Election  (1908)  and 
A  Change  in  the  Cabinet  (1909)  are  novels  of  the  same  order, 
save  that  they  introduce  a  larger  element  of  political 
satire.  These  three  books,  however,  belong  to  the  story 
of  satirical  writing  rather  than  that  of  the  true  novel. 
Mr.  Belloc  is  one  of  the  few  writers  of  the  day  who  can 
use  the  weapon  of  satire  without  laboured  clumsiness. 
The  heavy  bludgeon  is  not  always  out  of  place,  but  it 
must  yield  to  skilful  fence  with  the  rapier.  In  this 
relationship  it  is  natural  to  connect  the  names  of  Mr. 
Belloc  and  Mr.  Chesterton.  The  latter  is  diffuse,  and 
this  in  satire  is  almost  always  crippling  ;  but  he  is  some- 
times the  more  original  and  unexpected  of  the  two 
writers.  On  the  other  hand  Mr.  Belloc  has  a  concise- 
ness and  a  lucidity  of  style  in  which  Mr.  Chesterton  is 
generally  to  seek ;  and  it  is  this  which  lends  an  in- 
dividuality, a  grace,  a  charm  to  books  like  the  ever- 
delightful  Path  to  Rome  (1902),  to  his  essays,  his  topo- 
graphical and  historical  writings. 

Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton  only  claims  consideration  as  a 
novelist  incidentally.  He  is  other  things  first ;  for  the 
most  part  a  journalist,  witty,  paradoxical,  didactic,  in  an 
age  of  indifference  and  scepticism  preaching  with  whole- 
hearted enthusiasm  the  Catholic  Faith  as  it  is  understood 


412  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

in  a  certain  section  of  the  Church  of  England,  asserting 
that  only  for  the  gullible  and  credulous  is  it  possible  to 
be  sceptics,  denouncing  asceticism  and 
G.  K.  Chesterton,  the  mortification  of  the  flesh,  protesting 
b.  1874.  the  joy  of  life,  will  we  only  accept  and 

live  it.  Further,  with  all  his  whimsies, 
he  is  a  critic  of  insight  and  illumination,  as  witness  his 
Charles  Dickens  (1906),  his  brilliant  essay  introductory 
to  a  selection  from  Thackeray,  his  miscellaneous  essays 
collected  in  Heretics  (1905),  Orthodoxy  (1908)  and  other 
volumes.  Mr.  Chesterton's  work  is  varied,  and  it  is  nearly 
all  occasional  in  character — detached  essays  and  brief 
books  on  topical,  religious  and  literary  subjects — in  other 
words  it  is  journalism,  but  journalism  scintillating  with 
paradoxical  witticisms.  The  only  fault  of  Mr.  Chesterton's 
method  is  that  his  paradoxes  tend  to  become  mechanical 
and  stereotyped.  We  are  startled  into  attention  when 
we  read  of  the  "  boisterous  masculinity  "  of  Jane  Austen, 
but  the  trick  repeated,  like  a  familiar  drug,  loses  its  power. 
As  anyone  can,  after  a  kind,  learn  to  write  couplets  in  the 
manner  of  Pope,  so  anyone,  after  a  kind,  can  learn  to 
write  paradoxes  in  the  manner  of  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton. 

His  natural  habitat  is  Fleet  Street,  his  proper  work  the 
essay  or  sketch  written  hurriedly  against  time  ;  and  those 
of  his  books  which  may  be  loosely  described  as  novels 
differ  little  from  amusing  and  satirical  journalistic  essays 
thrown  into  loose  narrative  form.  They  are  frolics  and 
excursions  into  satiric  and  didactic  fantasy.  The  Napoleon 
of  Notting  Hill  (1903)  is  a  whimsical  nonsense  book,  the 
story  of  a  king  at  Notting  Hill  who  drives  in  his  blue 
omnibus.  The  Man  Who  was  Thursday  (1907)  is  an 
extravaganza,  too  long  for  its  subject,  of  an  anarchist 
council  who  discover  themselves  to  be  police  in  disguise. 
The  implication — the  ease  with  which  men  abet  each 
other  in  hypocrisies — is  obvious.  The  Ball  and  the  Cross 
(1910)  is  a  disjointed  fantasy  illustrative  of  faith  and  dis- 
belief. Manalive  (1912),  with  a  mingling  of  the  Chester- 
toman  manner,  is  nearer  to  life  and  a  little  less  whimsical. 

In  his  novels  Mr.  Chesterton  is  little  occupied  with  the 
actual  and  the  probable.  To  render  things  as  they  are 
and  probe  the  mysteries  of  character  in  conflict  with  the 
circumstances  of  life  is  not  his  purpose,  but  to  preach 


CHAP,  m]     THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  418 

a  religious  optimism  and  titillate  the  intellect  with  a  play 
of  words  and  whimsical  ideas.  With  the  essay  and  the 
journalistic  "  middle  "  he  is  at  home  :  his  tales  are,  on 
the  whole,  more  tiresome  than  his  other  books. 

Hector  Munro  ("  Saki  ")  was  also  an  essayist,  satirist 

and    writer    of    fantasies.      He    contributed    short    and 

humorous  sketches  to  the  papers,  which  were 

"  Saki,"  collected   in    Reginald  (1904),  Reginald  in 

1870-1916.          Russia  (1910)  and  The  Chronicles  of  Clovis 

(1912).     These  sketches  have  wit  and  point. 

and  the  humour  is  that  of  a  thoughtful  man. 

His  single  novel  was  The  Unbearable  Bassington  (1912). 
Mrs.  Elmsley  (1911)  is  to  be  attributed  to  another  Hector 
Munro  writing  in  a  manner  not  unlike  that  of  a  capable 
novelist  who  also  comes  from  the  north  of  England,  Mr. 
Allan  Monkhouse  ;x  and,  in  the  case  of  either,  narrative 
is  a  little  laboured,  and  the  dialogue  is  often  detached 
from  the  characters  or  permeated  with  the  theories  and 
thoughts  of  the  author.  The  Unbearable  Bassington  is  a 
sketch  of  character  and  social  life  written  in  epigram  and 
studied  phrase,  and,  despite  literary  skill,  suffers  from  the 
common  fault  of  narrative  in  this  method,  an  unconvincing 
distribution  of  conversational  brilliance,  if  the  indispen- 
sable foils  be  excepted.  When  William  Came  (1913),  a 
fanciful  and  bitter  satire  upon  the  apathy  of  England 
in  the  matter  of  national  defence,  is  a  strong  piece  of 
writing,  but  its  interest  is  not  that  of  the  novel  which 
studies  the  experiences  of  common  life.  Hector  Munro 
was  by  instinct  a  humorist  and  satirist ;  his  essays 
and  short  sketches  sparkle  with  a  wit  that  is  pregnant 
and  illuminative  ;  in  the  sphere  of  the  legitimate  novel, 
though  he  wrote  better  than  many,  he  was  unable  to 
make  full  use  of  his  natural  talents. 

Mr.  E.  V.  Lucas,  as  a  novelist,  is  likewise  a  man  of 

one   book,  the  realistic  and,  at  the   same  time,   quaint, 

charming    and    witty    Over    Bemerton's 

E.  V.  Lucas,  (1908).     The  charm  of  the  book  lies  in 

b.  1868.  its     aimless    digressions ;     narrative     is 

nothing ;  nevertheless  the  characters  are 

lightly  but  firmly  sketched. 

1  Allan  Monkhouse:  -4  Delirwance  (1893) ;  Love  in  a  Life  (190.3);  Dying 
Fires  (1912) 


414  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

The  Irish  novel,   it  has  been  pointed  out  in  another 
chapter,  has  little  relationship  with  the  Celtic  Revival, 

and,  indeed,  presents  no  marked  and 
Stephen  Gwynn,  distinctive  features  which  diversify  it 
b.  1864.  from  the  contemporary  novel  as  it  is 

written  in  England.  Nor,  again,  has 
Ireland  within  recent  years  produced  any  work  of  note 
in  fiction,  no  writing  that  may  definitely  be  placed  with 
that  of  Carleton,  Lever  and  Lover,  whatever  may  be  the 
faults  of  exaggeration  and  melodrama  in  the  earlier  Irish 
novelists.  There  are  but  few  now  who  call  for  mention — 
Canon  Sheehan,  Mr.  Stephen  Gwynn,  '  G.  A.  Birmingham  ' 
and  Mr.  James  Stephens.  And  Mr.  Gwynn  is  a  critic,  a 
miscellaneous  writer,  a  Nationalist  in  politics,  before  he 
is  a  novelist.  His  few  novels,  including  The  Repentance 
of  a  Private  Secretary  (1898)  and  The  Old  Knowledge  (1901) 
call  for  no  special  remark.  Mr.  Gwynn  is  deservedly 
better  known  as  an  essayist,  editor,  critic,  topographical 
and  political  writer.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  speak  in  detail 
of  the  many  novels  of  the  popular  '  G.  A.  Birmingham  ' 
(Canon  James  Owen  Hannay),  who  began  by  writing 

ecclesiastical  books  under  his  own  name, 
G.  A.  Birmingham,  before  he  adopted  a  pseudonym  and 
b.  1865.  wrote  in  rapid  succession  a  series  of 

high-spirited,  humorous,  inventive  and 
resourceful  novels — among  them  Benedict  Kavanagh  (190G), 
Spanish  Gold  (1908),  Lalage's  Lovers  (1911)  and  The  Red 
Hand  of  Ulster  (1912).  Canon  Hannay  is  a  competent 
writer,  but  his  chief  purpose  is  to  entertain,  and  as  a 
novelist  he  represents  no  literary  aim  or  idealism. 

A  better  literary  quality  and  greater  personal  charm  is 
inherent   in    the    novels    of   Canon    Sheehan,    who    won 

fame  as  an  author  late  in  life.  His  first 
Canon  P.  A.  ,  ,.  ,  ,.n  ,  „ 

0,     .  book  did  not  appear  till   he  was  forty- 

'  three    years    old.      Before    this    he    had 

worked  as  a  curate,  first  in  England, 
but  later  and  for  the  most  part  in  Ireland.  In  1895  he 
became  parish  priest  of  Doneraile,  and  in  1905  Canon  of 
Cloyne.  In  recognition  of  the  services  his  writings  had 
rendered  to  religion  the  Pope  conferred  on  him  the  degree 
of  D.D.  in  1903. 

To  the  greater  number  of  his  readers  Canon  Sheehan 


CHAP,  m]      THE  CONTEMPORARY  NOVEL  415 

is  known  as  the  author  of  My  New  Curate  (1899),  which 
first  gave  proof  of  his  power  as  a  story-teller  and  his 
command  of  a  clear  and  attractive  English  style.  But, 
beside  this  and  other  tales  of  simple  Irish  life,  he  essayed 
authorship  in  several  different  fields.  The  Triumph  of 
Failure  (1899),  a  Roman  Catholic  apologia  cast  in  the 
iorm  of  a  story,  remained  a  favourite  book  with  Canon 
Sheehan  himself.  The  Queen's  Fillet  (1911)  was  an 
historical  romance  constructed  upon  the  accepted  patterns. 
In  Miriam  Lucas  (1912)  he  abandoned  his  native  Ireland 
and  lost  his  touch  with  reality.  Under  the  Cedars  and  the 
Stars  (1903)  and  Parerga  (1908)  are  two  volumes  of  dis- 
cursive essays  by  a  writer  gifted  with  a  style  and  a 
sufficient  body  of  ideas  to  hold  the  reader. 

But  the  charm  of  Canon  Sheehan' s  writing  is  to  be 
found  in  the  novel  with  which  his  name  is  associated, 
My  New  Curate,  and  its  successors  in  kind,  Luke  Delmege 
(1901),  Glenanaar  (1905)  and  The  Blindness  of  Dr.  Grey 
(1909).  In  these  tales  he  wrote  of  the  life  he  knew  well, 
the  parish  priests  and  curates  and  peasantry  of  Ireland. 
The  stories  are  told  and  the  characters  delineated  with 
a  humour  and  an  air  of  cultured  and  reflective  ease  which 
lend  them  a  peculiar  charm.  In  these  novels  there  is  no 
writing  of  note  or  importance  ;  the  characterisation  is 
good  without  being  vivid  ;  but  the  urbane  humour  and 
excellent  style  raise  them  above  ordinary  books  of  the 
day. 

Mr.   James   Stephens  was   discovered  for  a  poet  and 
rescued  from  the  office  typewriter  by  A.  E.,  and  when 
he  is  writing  prose  it  is  the  poet  with 
James  Stephens,      the    dashing,    careless,    happy-go-lucky, 
b.  1882.  Spartan  philosophy  of  life,  the  poet  of 

Insurrections  and  The  Hill  of  Vision, 
who  wins  the  day.  The  Crock  of  Gold  (1912)  is  written 
in  prose,  but  it  is  a  poetic  fantasy  as  much  as  Meredith's 
Shaving  of  Shagpat,  save  that  the  humour  is  almost  too 
riotous  and  abundant  for  poetic  fantasy.  It  is  pure  fancy, 
a  fairy-tale  for  grown-up  people,  introducing  a  philosopher 
dwelling  among  the  pine  f  woods,  his  shrew  of  a  wife, 
Leprecauns,  Pan,  Angus  Og,  god  of  joy  and  love,  beasts 
and  insects,  all  speaking  in  the  Irish  idiom.  Mr.  Stephens 
has  a  native  gift  of  style,  a  fine  instinct  for  the  choice  of 


416  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

the  right  word,  his  pages  are  rich  in  epigrammatic  reflec- 
i  ions  upon  life  ;  but  perhaps  the  most  striking  charac- 
teristic of  The  Crock  of  Gold  is  the  abundant  and  varied 
wealth  of  his  imagination.  The  same  reckless  imagination, 
half-cynical  yet  generous  humour,  give  a  distinguishing 
character  to  the  storiettes  and  impressionistic  sketches  of 
men,  women  and  children  in  Here  are  Ladies  (1913). 
The  Charwoman's  Daughter  (1912)  was,  perhaps,  written 
earlier  than  the  other  two,  for  it  is  a  less  original  book, 
although  it  shows  that  Mr.  Stephens  can  write  a  realistic 
tale  of  life  among  the  Dublin  poor.  Like  all  his  attempts 
at  story-telling  it  is  no  more  than  a  sketch,  and  he  some- 
times forgets  that  the  novelist  is  not  the  essayist.  But 
it  is  a  sincere  and  sympathetic  piece  of  writing.  The 
Crock  of  Gold  is,  however,  Mr.  Stephens' s  most  distinctive 
achievement  hitherto  in  imagination  and  poetry,  more 
original  even  than  his  verse  ;  and  it  yet  remains  to  be 
seen  whether  time  will  or  will  not  betray  the  high  promise 
of  that  book. 


CHAPTER  IV 

WOMEN   NOVELISTS 

Mrs.  Humphry  Ward — ' Olive  Schreiner' — ' Sarah  Grand' — 'George 
Egerton' — '  Iota '— Elizabeth  Robins — May  Sinclair— M.  P.  Will- 
cocks — Beatrice  Harraden — ' Lucas  Malet' — 'John  Oliver  Hobbes* 
— Mary  Coleridge  — '  Elizabeth ' — Ellen  Thorneycroft  Fowler — Lady 
Ritchie— M.  L.  Woods— 'John  Strange  Winter'— W.  K.  Clifford- 
Mrs.  Alfred  Sidgwick— Netta  SyretWUna  L.  Silberrad— Ethel 
Sidgwick — Jane  Barlow — Katharine  Tynan — Nora  Hopper — '  Somer- 
ville  and  Ross' — ' Ouida' — M.  E.  Braddon — Marie  Corelli. 

As  early  as  the  beginnings  of  human  speech  the  impulse 
to  story-telling  must  have  come  strongly  upon  man,  and 
fiction  has  been  written  since  the  earliest  stages  of  any 
script ;  but  the  novel,  as  we  understand  that  word  to-day, 
is  a  literary  form  of  comparatively  recent  growth.  In 
England  we  may  date  it  from  the  eighteenth  century. 
Fiction  in  plenty  had  been  written  and  printed  before 
that  time  ;  but  the  consecutive  life  that  can  be  traced 
from  the  work  of  Defoe  to  our  own  day  is  a  growth  in 
itself.  Defoe's  novels,  it  may  be,  were  a  growth  from  the 
womb  of  the  picaresque  romance,  but  the  child  grew 
under  a  new  nurture  and  the  conditions  of  a  more  stable 
and  ordered  society.  His  books  were  no  longer  the 
fantasy,  the  chronicle  romance  or  the  short  conte :  they 
were  that  kind  of  fiction  we  now  define  by  the  epithet 
realistic.  And  from  Defoe  to  the  date  of  the  Sentimental 
Journey  all  things  were  added  to  the  novel :  little  has 
since  been  done  save  the  constant  perfecting  of  its 
machinery.  In  fifty  years  the  working  principle  was  set 
and  established  ;  and  all  changes  since  have  been  little 
more  than  modifications  or  adaptations  of  the  standard 
pattern  to  new  conditions. 

As  soon  as  the  novel  of  the  eighteenth  century  won  its 
right  of  way  the  path  was  followed  by  an  ever  increasing 
company  of  women  writers,  who  found  that  here  they 
could  compete  on  more  equal  terms  with  men  than  in 

2  E  417 


418  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

any  other  form  of  the  literary  art.  With  the  novel,  at 
least,  a  few  women  have  challenged  the  higher  ranges 
attained  by  men.  Sarah  Fielding,  Mrs.  Haywood,  Mrs. 
Radcliffe,  Mrs.  Inchbald,  Hannah  Moore  are  still  remem- 
bered by  name,  and  by  the  few  their  books  are  read. 
At  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  Frances  Burney 
and  Miss  Edgeworth  did  better  work,  though  they  fell 
far  behind  Jane  Austen,  incomparably  the  greatest  woman 
novelist  England  has  produced.  It  is  needless  further  to 
multiply  names  and  instances ;  for  novels  written  by 
women  fall  faster  than  autumn  leaves  in  Vallombrosa. 
After  Jane  Austen  the  three  greatest  names  in  English 
fiction  are  Emily  and  Charlotte  Bronte  and  George  Eliot. 

And  these  names  point  a  moral.  One  of  the  first 
tendencies  in  feminine  fiction  was  the  projection  of 
domestic  and  social  interest,  the  emphasis  upon  the 
importance  of  small  details  in  the  common  round  of  life. 
In  a  few  women  writers,  Mrs.  Radcliffe  for  example,  the 
tendency  to  romance  appeared,  but  as  woman's  life  is, 
in  general,  less  adventurous  than  that  of  men,  so  the 
romantic  incident,  love  apart,  has  less  play  in  feminine 
fiction.  And  this  was  all  to  the  good  ;  for  it  emphasised 
what  human  nature  gladly  forgets  on  the  slightest  pro- 
vocation— the  enormous  importance  of  the  insignificant. 
But  with  the  Bronte  sisters  and  George  Eliot  a  change 
came  over  the  face  of  things.  On  the  one  hand  passionate 
earnestness  and  a  franker  realism  and  on  the  other 
an  obsession  with  intellectualism  were  emphasised  as 
they  had  never  been.  These  tendencies  have  largely 
moulded  the  later  courses  of  novel  writing  by  women  ; 
and  not  infrequently  for  evil.  Ethical  propagandism, 
abstract  intellectualism,  debate  upon  economic,  religious 
and  sexual  questions,  strenuous  realism  (not  always  with 
sufficient  knowledge  of  life),  have  often  warred  against 
the  things  that  are  more  excellent.  Jane  Austen  had  no 
message  to  deliver,  but  the  impersonal  truthfulness  of 
her  painting  of  life  shows  us  more  that  is  of  permanent 
value  to  ourselves  than  all  the  intellectual  labour  of  George 
Eliot  and  many  of  the  later  women  novelists. 

But,  for  good  or  ill,  the  argumentative  novel  by  women, 
trom  the  level  of  Olive  Schreiner,  Sarah  Grand  and  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward  to  that  of  Miss  Marie  Corelli,  is  with  us. 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  419 

For  over  a  quarter  of  a  century  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  has 
issued  to  her  hundreds  of  thousands  of  readers  in  England 

and  America  her  stately  sequence  of 
Mrs.  Humphry  intellectual  novels,  and  still  the  armies 
Ward,  b.  1851.  who  support  the  circulating  libraries 

consume  unsatiated  a  fiction  which 
treats  the  range  of  modern  life,  its  religious  difficulties, 
its  questions,  social,  political,  moral,  with  a  thorough  and 
laborious  exactness  not  always  found  in  works  sociological, 
theological,  moral,  addressing  themselves  only  to  the 
reader  acquainted  with  the  technicalities  of  the  subject 
and  making  no  profession  to  engage  the  lighter-minded. 
The  subject  matter  of  Robert  Elsmere  (1888),  David  Grieve 
(1892)  and  Marcella  (1894),  divested  of  the  unnecessary 
accompaniment  of  a  story  would  not  have  sold  in  tens 
against  the  thousands  actually  reached  in  circulation. 
Nevertheless,  though  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  has  skill  in 
developing  a  story,  hardly  anyone  will  contend  that  she 
has  a  happy  gift  of  mixing  her  heavier  matter  with  a 
narrative  thrilling  and  dramatic,  which  deceives  the  unwary 
reader  into  a  belief  that  he  is  interested,  till  he  finds  the 
moral,  like  the  advertisement,  administered  at  the  end. 
There  is  no  lightness  in  her  touch,  no  graces,  no  rapidity 
of  movement ;  her  intellect,  like  that  of  George  Eliot, 
works  slowly  and  laboriously,  and,  like  George  Eliot, 
she  is  serious-minded.  In  her  intense  earnestness,  her 
depressing  seriousness  and  her  total  lack  of  humour  lies 
the  secret  of  her  success  with  the  thousands  who  read  her 
novels.  Among  the  majority  of  her  readers  will  be  found 
the  tacit  acceptance  of  the  fallacy  that  novels  are  not 
serious  books,  and  that  serious  books  are  more  worthy 
of  attention  than  lighter  literature.  In  this  belief  they 
live  and  move,  but  the  flesh  is  weak  and  conduct  rarely 
attains  to  profession.  When  reading  the  novels  of  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward  they  can  still  their  twinges  of  conscience 
in  the  persuasion  that  they  are  studying  almost  serious 
books,  an  opinion  in  which  others  will  more  than  agree 
with  them.  Among  the  amateurs  of  social  and  religious 
thought,  who  are  interested  in  topics  of  the  day,  without 
any  inclination  to  observe  and  think  for  themselves,  will 
be  found  the  admiring  readers  of  Robert  Elsmere  and 
Marcella.  There  is  a  finality,  an  authoritative  manner  in 


420  THE  NOVEL  [PART  nr 

the  implications  of  these  books,  which  cannot  fail  to 
impress.  How  many  who  read  Robert  Elsmere  must  have 
been  staggered  to  notice  that,  despite  its  overpowering 
evidence,  there  were  still  clergymen  who  held  their  orders 
and  betrayed  no  intention  of  relinquishing  them.  It  is 
difficult  to  avoid  the  belief  that  in  reading  these  novels 
one  stands  in  the  forefront  of  modern  and  advanced 
thought.  The  reader  is  flattered,  continues  to  read  and 
gathers  others  about  him. 

For  these  dilettantes  in  seriousness  there  is  no  question 
of  art.  A  book  is  nothing  in  itself  apart  from  the  moral 
instruction  it  conveys.  For  the  magic  of  style  they  have 
no  faculty  of  appreciation  ;  emotion  and  imagination  only 
puzzle  them.  And  humour,  without  which  life  cannot  be 
clearly  seen,  they  probably  regard  as  unworthy  the  dignity 
of  better-class  fiction.  But  for  others,  and  they  are  not 
a  small  class,  it  is  the  absence  of  these  qualities  which 
prevents  them  from  regarding  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  as 
a  great  writer.  Her  work  is  interesting  and  valuable  to 
her  generation  in  its  comprehensive  grasp  of  present-day 
conditions ;  but  unemotional  and  intellectual  photo- 
graphy is  not  art  and  has  little  likelihood  of  long  life. 
The  profoundest  topic  intellectually  treated  in  narrative 
is  as  short-lived  as  most  intellectual  dogmatisms.  But 
the  overpowering  seriousness  of  it  all  has  won  the  respect 
of  masses  who  regard  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  as  a  teacher, 
delivering  earnestly  the  important  message  committed  to 
her  ;  while  the  wit,  humour  and  ironical  banter  of  her 
kinsman,  Matthew  Arnold,  brought  him  the  reputation 
of  being  a  sceptic  who  trifled  carelessly  with  serious 
things. 

The  tenor  of  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  books  is  partly 
accounted  for  by  the  history  of  her  early  life.  Her  father, 
Thomas  Arnold,  was  a  son  of  the  great  head  master  of 
Rugby.  Thomas  Arnold,  the  younger,  was  an  inspector 
of  schools  in  Tasmania,  and  Mary  Augusta  was  born  at 
Hobart  in  1851.  About  this  time  her  father's  mind  was 
troubled  with  religious  difficulties  ;  and  in  1856  he  was 
received  into  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  In  consequence 
he  resigned  his  inspectorship,  returned  home  with  his 
family,  and  was  appointed  by  Newman,  Professor  of 
English  Literature  at  Dublin.  He  followed  Newman  to 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  421 

Birmingham,  and  there  published  his  Manual  of  English 
Literature  (1862).  Again  doubts  came  upon  him  and  he 
reverted  to  the  Anglican  Communion.  But  in  1877  he 
returned  to  the  Church  of  Rome  ;  and  in  1882  he  was 
appointed  Professor  of  English  Literature  at  University 
College,  Dublin.  He  died  in  1900.  His  daughter  was 
brought  up  chiefly  at  Oxford  ;  and  early  associations 
with  scholarship  and  religious  discussion  have  permanently 
impressed  themselves  upon  her  mind.  In  1872  she  married 
Mr.  Thomas  Humphry  Ward,  fellow  and  tutor  of  Brase- 
nose,  editor  of  the  well-known  English  Poets  (1880-81), 
and  later  the  principal  art  critic  of  The  Times.  Thus 
Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  grew  up  under  the  traditions  of 
Oxford,  the  Arnolds  and  an  academic  atmosphere  of 
religious  conflict.  And  equally  with  George  Eliot,  with 
whom  it  is  natural  to  compare  her,  her  work  is  power- 
fully influenced  by  the  environment  of  her  girlhood.  In 
the  Oxford  manner  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  instructs  those 
less  fortunate  than  herself,  with  a  high  moral  earnest- 
ness she  carries  on  her  shoulders  the  burden  of  all  the 
churches,  and  in  the  surcharged  atmosphere  of  religious 
difficulties  she  breathes  freely. 

She  began  as  an  authoress  by  contributing  articles  to 
Smith's  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography  (1877-87)  and 
wrote  reviews  for  Macmillan's  Magazine.  In  1885  she 
published  a  translation  of  Amiel's  Journal  Intime.  Her 
first  experiment  in  fiction  was  a  child's  story  ;  and  her 
first  true  novel,  Miss  Bretherton  (1886),  is  but  a  slight 
book.  In  1888  came  Robert  Elsmere,  a  novel  gathering 
up  the  strands  of  the  battle  between  religion,  philosophy 
and  science,  summarising  admirably  the  main  features  of 
the  conflict  as  they  appeared  to  men  in  the  fourth  quarter 
of  the  last  century.  The  book  came  a  little  after  the 
particular  battle  it  described  was  over,  with  honours 
drawn  on  either  side  ;  but  because  it  was  a  belated 
picture  it  made  a  wide  appeal  to  the  great  majority  who 
always  learn  after  the  event.  It  ran  through  seven  three- 
volume  editions  in  England  and  a  large  number  of  cheap 
editions  in  America.  Whatever  its  merits  or  demerits, 
whether  as  a  work  of  art  or  a  philosophic-religious  tract. 
Robert  Elsmere  was  one  of  the  most  widely-read  novels 
of  the  period.  Its  popularity  it  owed  chiefly  to  its  dis- 


422  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

cussion  of  religious  questions  ;  for,  in  the  form  of  a 
serious  novel,  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  succeeded  in  forcing 
home  upon  thousands,  normally  uninterested  in  these 
questions,  a  remarkable  anxiety  concerning  the  place  of 
the  miraculous  in  religious  belief.  Mr.  Gladstone  came 
out  into  the  lists  to  defend  Christianity  in  the  pages  of 
the  Nineteenth  Century ;  the  book  was  reviewed  and 
written  upon  in  German  periodicals  and  translated  into 
many  languages.  If  this  combination  of  notoriety  and 
popularity  was  due  primarily  to  the  religious  and  spiritual 
problems  treated  in  the  book,  Robert  Elsmere  is  not  with- 
out strong  character-drawing  and  dramatic  force.  The 
didactic  persistency  of  the  narrative  may  be  incongruous 
with  good  art,  but  the  book  can  claim  to  be  a  true  picture 
of  English  life  at  a  certain  stage  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
it  reflects  its  academic  thought,  country,  middle-class  and 
cultured  life.  In  her  character  sketches  Mrs.  Ward 
borrows  from  contemporary  situation — Grey  of  St. 
Anselm's  is  studied  from  T.  H.  Green,  the  philosopher, 
and  J.  R.  Green,  the  historian.  The  thought  is  not  new, 
it  reflects  to  a  large  extent  the  ideas  of  Matthew  Arnold, 
which  in  themselves  were  not  those  of  an  original  thinker. 
Arnold  attempted  to  save  religion  in  England  by  recasting 
it  hurriedly  upon  paper,  with  the  equipment  of  a  fine 
culture,  a  remarkably  good  knowledge  of  the  Authorised 
Version  of  the  Bible  and  a  creditable  acquaintance  with 
the  results  of  biblical  higher  criticism.  The  intention, 
however  good,  was  fated  to  failure.  Newman,  in  another 
direction,  had  tried  it  before,  only  to  discover  that  the 
Via  Media  was  a  paper  religion,  whereas  Protestantism 
and  Catholicism  were  religions  of  the  heart  which  had 
swayed  the  emotions  and  morals  of  generations  of  men. 
The  modified  forms  of  Christianity  to  be  found  in  Literature 
and  Dogma  and  Robert  Elsmere  are  interesting  as  personal 
studies,  but  they  make  no  difference  to  the  mass  of  the 
people. 

And  Mrs.  Ward  is  too  serious  ;  she  has  none  of  the 
supercilious  humour  and  irony  of  Arnold.  Her  literary 
gift  in  Robert  Elsmere  best  appears  in  the  happy  appro- 
priateness of  her  quotations,  and  in  her  passages  descriptive 
of  nature.  She  reaches  distinction  in  her  painting  of 
landscape,  sunlight,  shadow,  wind  and  rain.  And  in  this 


CHAP,  ivj  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  423 

faculty  she  is  not  confined  to  the  scenery  of  Westmorland 
or  any  other  part  of  England  with  which  she  is  intimately 
acquainted.  In  one  of  her  later  novels,  Canadian  Born 
(1910),  a  story  of  colonial  life,  the  fruit  of  a  visit  to  Canada, 
she  is  at  her  best  in  this  aspect  of  her  work.  The  descrip- 
tion of  Lake  Louise,  bathed  in  the  freshness  of  the  morning, 
will  almost  compare  with  Meredith's  wonderful  descrip- 
tion of  sunrise  in  Tyrol.  The  worst  feature  of  Robert 
Elsmere,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the  figure  of  the  sceptical 
and  scholarly  squire  of  Elsmere' s  parish,  an  exaggerated 
Coningsby  of  the  intellect,  a  character  far  more  ludicrous 
than  impressive. 

The  History  of  David  Grieve  is  a  tale  even  more 
ambitious  than  Robert  Elsmere,  and  heavily  overweighted 
with  didactic  purpose,  covering  a  wide  field  of  study  in 
sociological  and  religious  problems.  In  David  Grieve  the 
authoress  has  chosen  for  her  hero  not  the  scholar,  but  a 
rough  man  of  the  lower  classes.  Lawful  marriage  and 
free  love  are  contrasted  in  his  relationship  with  two 
women  ;  his  mental  experience  affords  an  opportunity 
for  illustrating  the  battle  of  the  modern  sects,  in  religion, 
politics,  sociology.  In  a  popular  edition  of  David  Grieve 
Mrs.  Ward  chose  to  defend  the  novel  of  speculative  ideas 
by  asserting  that  in  life  these  are  present,  and  that  to 
cast  them  away  is  to  confine  art  to  the  reflection  of  but 
a  part  of  life.  In  her  eyes  the  speculative  matter  of 
David  Grieve  is  as  legitimate  to  the  novelist  as  the  emotions 
of  the  peasant.  Mrs.  Ward  failed  to  see  that  the  question 
is  not  whether  speculative  ideas  should  find  their  way 
into  the  novel,  nor  even  the  extent  to  which  they  should 
find  their  way,  but  the  manner  in  which  they  are  intro- 
duced. Assuming,  despite  the  theory  of  Wilde,  that  it 
is  the  business  of  art  to  reflect  life,  the  artist  has  also 
to  remember  that  nothing  in  nature  or  in  human  nature 
is  plainly  expository  of  any  ethical  or  religious  idea,  save 
that  brought  to  it  by  the  spectator.  And  great  art,  in 
like  manner,  has  no  neat  and  unmistakable  doctrines  of 
life  and  conduct.  Experience  is  action  and  reaction 
between  man  and  his  environment ;  whatever  inspira- 
tion art  has  to  offer  lies  in  a  temperamental  reciprocity 
between  the  individual  and  the  novel,  poem  or  picture. 
But  in  David  Grieve  we  sit  at  the  feet  of  a  mistress  who 


424  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iV 

permits  no  doubt  of  her  meaning  ;  nothing  is  left  to  be 
gathered  from  experience ;  we  learn  by  rote  from  a  text- 
book. And  in  the  end  of  things,  Jane  Austen  or  Synge, 
to  choose  two  dissimilar  types,  who  never  dreamed  of 
inculcating  religious  or  speculative  ideas,  set  us  more 
in  harmony  with  life,  and  therefore  move  us  more  for 
good  than  all  the  laboured  philosophies  of  all  the  intel- 
lectual novelists. 

The  content  of  David  Grieve  is  large,  the  matter  diver- 
sified, the  scope  a  little  overpowering.  With  Robert 
Elsmere,  and  two  later  novels,  Helbeck  of  Bannisdale 
(1898)  and  The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  (1911),  it  is  to 
be  counted  with  those  tales  of  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward 
which  deal  mainly  with  religious  problems.  Helbeck  of 
Bannisdale  traces  the  love  affairs  of  a  devout  Catholic 
and  an  Agnostic  girl.  The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  is  a 
sequel  to  Robert  Elsmere,  and  introduces  characters  from 
the  earlier  book.  But  times  have  changed,  the  full  tide 
of  Modernism  has  set  in,  and  Richard  Meynell,  a  beneficed 
clergyman  and  leader  of  the  Modernists,  claims  the  right 
for  himself  and  those  who  follow  him  to  remain  within 
the  national  church,  there  to  work  out  their  salvation 
and  that  of  a  church  which  is  rapidly  losing  its  hold  upon 
the  people  because  it  refuses  to  modify  its  interpretation 
of  the  creeds.  As  a  story  it  moves  more  rapidly  than 
Robert  Elsmere  ;  and  the  optimistic  futurism  of  the  hero 
is  certainly  more  attractive  than  the  painful  conscientious- 
ness of  the  central  figure  of  the  earlier  book.  But  in  un- 
bending seriousness  and  confident  didacticism  Mrs.  Ward 
has  lost  nothing  in  the  interval  of  twenty-three  years. 

David  Grieve  showed  that  the  authoress  was  as  much 
interested  in  politics  and  social  questions  as  in  religion  ; 
and  Marcella,  its  sequel,  Sir  George  Tressady  (1896) 
and  The  Coryston  Family  (1913)  are  largely  concerned 
with  social  questions.  In  Marcella  Mrs.  Ward  has  drawn 
the  woman  of  intellect  and  culture,  who  discovers  that 
the  world  is  not  to  be  regenerated  by  doctrines  of  socialism 
untouched  by  force  of  character.  Sir  George  Tressady 
continues  the  story  of  Marcella  and  introduces  the  young 
politician,  Tressady,  whom  she  succeeds  unintentionally 
in  alluring  into  love  with  her  in  the  course  of  trying  to 
win  his  vote  for  her  husband's  party.  The  Coryston 


.  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  425 

Family,  in  large  and  spectacular  outline,  covers  the  ground 
of  most  social  and  political  questions  in  our  day.  It  is 
able,  it  is  ingenious,  and  again  it  illustrates  Mrs.  Ward's 
power  of  putting  together  a  vastly  complicated  scene  of 
action.  But  theories  and  questions  are  so  obviously  the 
chief  interest  of  the  authoress,  that  the  reader  is  never 
moved  to  reciprocal  interest  in  her  characters,  who  are 
only  foils  to  doctrine. 

Besides  these  Mrs.  Ward  has  written  tales  of  a  more 
general  kind,  based  upon  character-study  and  less  upon 
the  development  of  abstract  and  speculative  ideas,  though 
these  are  by  no  means  divorced  from  the  narrative. 
Among  these  miscellaneous  novels  the  more  important 
are  Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (1903),  which  borrows  its  theme 
from  the  story  of  Mile.  Lespinasse,  The  Marriage  of 
William  Ashe  (1905),  the  story  of  a  statesman  and  his 
unruly  wife,  an  adaptation  of  the  history  of  Lady  Caroline 
Lamb,  and  Fenwick's  Career  (1906),  a  tale  of  artistic  life, 
in  part  indebted  to  the  career  of  Haydon. 

With  George  Eliot  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  has  been 
refused  the  name  and  honour  of  artist,  and  described 
as  a  woman  of  great  intellectual  powers  who  has  chosen 
to  write  novels.  And  in  her  case  the  disparagement  has 
greater  truth.  In  her  four  earlier  books,  when  she  drew 
upon  the  reminiscences  of  girlhood,  George  Eliot  sketched 
characters  like  Janet,  Adam  Bede,  Mrs.  Poyser,  Silas 
Marner  ;  but,  after  four  or  five  short  years  of  inspiration, 
she  fell  back  upon  hard  thinking,  and  no  great  work  of 
art,  no  convincing  portrait  of  a  personality,  has  been 
created  by  diligent  thought.  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  begins 
by  shaping  her  novels  and  the  characters  they  contain 
intellectually,  without  emotional  leavening,  and  the  result 
is  a  series  of  novels  which  reflects  contemporary  life,  faith- 
fully, closely,  patiently,  in  a  number  of  its  aspects  and  in 
diverse  social  planes,  but  the  whole  is  lacking  in  spon- 
taneity, it  is  too  evidently  a  work  of  industry  and  strong- 
talent.  Emotion  there  is  little,  save  a  high  enthusiasm 
of  the  intellect ;  wit  and  humour  are  absent,  and  to  the 
writer's  credit,  be  it  said,  she  makes  no  pretence  to  these 
gifts.  It  is  difficult,  indeed,  to  think  of  any  novelist 
more  serious-minded  since  Richardson  put  the  finishing 
touches  to  Grandison.  Mrs.  Ward's  theories  and  doc- 


426  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

trines  are  the  common  heritage  of  her  family  since  the 
days  of  Thomas  Arnold  at  Rugby.  These  she  has  shaped 
into  the  substance  of  prose  fiction.  The  enthusiasm  of 
the  philanthropist  and  reformer  is  hers ;  unconscious 
superiority  of  manner  engendered  by  a  creed  of  culture 
limits  the  range  of  her  sympathy.  The  unloveliness  of 
Dissent  disturbs  her  as  it  did  Matthew  Arnold  ;  and  she 
has  little  share  in  the  vision  granted  to  Browning  and 
Walt  Whitman,  that  the  vulgar  failures  of  life  are  often 
as  valuable  in  the  sight  of  God  and  man  as  the  bitter 
defeat  of  the  dreamer  of  noble  ideas.  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward's  view  of  life  is  too  unbendingly  serious,  and  too 
academic,  to  note  clearly  and  consistently  the  real  springs 
of  life  in  those  primal  emotions  and  impulses  which  finally 
govern  the  tangled  complexities  of  a  social  world  thinly 
veneered  with  artifice  and  convention.  Tolstoy  could  be 
as  perseveringly  didactic  as  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward,  but 
he  understood  the  natural  man  and  woman  who  have 
never  sought  the  means  of  grace  ;  Mrs.  Ward  writes  of 
these  only  by  hearsay  and  guess.  She  would  have  been 
a  better  observer  of  life  had  she  been  taught  to  think 
less  in  the  language  of  books  :  she  is  always  least  the 
artist  when  she  thinks  most ;  and  it  is  rarely  she  escapes 
forcing  her  work  by  hard  thinking. 

In  the  technique  of  the  novel  she  has  learned  much. 
She  can  unfold  a  tale  with  great  skill,  whether  in  her 
longer  books  or  in  the  short  Story  of  Bessie  Costrell  (1895) ; 
and  her  development  of  the  narrative  by  means  of  dialogue 
is  often  strikingly  ingenious.  But  these  virtues  do  not 
save  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  novels  from  appearing  works 
of  intellect  rather  than  inspiration. 

The  tenor  of  Mrs.  Ward's  thought  had  been  settled  in 
the  Victorian  days  of  Tennysonian  morality,  in  the  atmo- 
sphere of  eager  conflict  between  the  forces  of  sceptical 
science  and  orthodox  religious  belief,  at  a  time  when  the 
more  ardent  of  the  leisured  and  fortunate  class  confidently 
hoped  that  they  had  only  to  stoop  to  raise  the  masses 
to  a  plane  of  higher  thinking  and  happier  life.  Many 
things  have  changed  and  some  illusions  have  been  shattered 
since ;  but  Mrs.  Ward's  attitude  toward  the  world  of 
men  and  women  has  not  greatly  altered.  Though  she  is 
always  earnestly  occupied  with  the  question  of  the  hour 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  427 

she  remains  Victorian,  distant,  staid  in  her  manner  ;  and 
among  women  writers  of  the  intellectual  novel  she  has  no 
true  successor.  In  one  sense  she  belongs  to  a  past,  and 
others  to  whom  it  is  now  natural  to  turn  belong  to  a  new 
world.  If  they  treat,  as  they  do  at  large,  questions  social, 
sexual,  religious,  it  is  in  a  new,  a  franker  and  a  more 
uncompromisingly  realistic  manner.  Olive  Schreiner's 
Story  of  an  African  Farm  (1883)  may  be  taken  as  a  rough 
indication  of  a  new  date  in  the  story  of  the  feminine 
novel.  Other  women  writers  who  have,  since  that  time, 
built  their  narratives  upon  questions  of  religion,  sex, 
morality,  are  not  necessarily  to  be  counted  her  disciples, 
but  the  Story  of  an  African  Farm  marks  the  beginning 
of  a  new  spirit  and  method.  And  among  others  who  have 
followed  a  similar  path  are  to  be  named  Sarah  Grand, 
George  Egerton,  Iota,  Elizabeth  Robins,  Beatrice  Harraden, 
May  Sinclair,  Lucas  Malet  and  Miss  M.  P.  Willcocks. 

Olive  Schreiner  (Mrs.  S.   C.   Cronwright)  was  born  in 
Basutoland  where  her  father  was  a  Lutheran  missionary. 

In  1882  she  came  to  England  with 
Olive  Schreiner,  the  manuscript  of  her  Story  of  an 
b.  1862.  African  Farm,  which  was  published 

in  the  following  year.  And,  though 
she  has  continued  to  write  at  intervals  for  thirty  years, 
she  will  be  remembered  by  this  one  book.  The  title  is 
scarcely  a  guide  to  its  contents.  It  is  not  a  story  of 
adventure,  nor  of  pioneer  life,  nor  even  a  quiet  and 
descriptive  narrative  of  life  on  an  African  farm.  Olive 
Schreiner  possesses  the  gifts  of  imagination  and  a  pic- 
turesque style,  which  enable  her  to  draw  vividly  life  on 
a  lonely  Boer  farm  set  in  the  midst  of  the  sandy  veldt. 
She  shows  sympathetic  insight  and  abundant  humour  in 
her  drawing  of  the  characters  of  the  fat  and  dirty  Boer 
widow,  Tant'  Sannie,  of  the  kindly  and  gullible  German 
overseer,  of  the  ragged  Irish  adventurer,  Bonaparte 
Blenkins,  of  the  two  little  girls,  Em  and  Lyndall,  and  of 
the  German  boy,  Waldo.  In  simplicity  of  narration, 
economy  of  material,  close  concentration  in  the  drawing 
of  characters  and  scenes,  the  Story  of  an  African  Farm 
is  an  example  of  true  art.  But  the  groundwork  of  the 
narrative  lies  deeper,  in  the  study  of  a  mind  tortured 
with  religious  doubts.  The  ideas  belong  to  an  old,  a 


428  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

way- weary  and  a  sophisticated  world.  It  is  a  sad  and 
haunting  tale  of  the  passage  of  a  sensitive  and  lonely 
mind  from  Calvinism  to  Atheism.  And  in  the  latter  half 
of  the  book  woman,  her  rights  in  society  and  her  relation- 
ship to  man  arise  for  discussion.  The  beauty,  the  tragic 
intensity  and  the  frank  sincerity  of  the  story  would  save 
the  book  were  the  abstract  basis  of  the  narrative  more 
obviously  exposed  ;  but  it  is  impossible  not  to  suspect, 
despite  the  realism  of  the  character-drawing,  that  the 
ideas  are  incongruous  with  their  setting.  So  much  sim- 
plicity and  so  much  sophisticated  argument  of  the  mind 
are  incompatible.  The  doubts  which  resolve  themselves 
into  the  passionate  scepticism  of  the  boy,  Waldo,  would 
find  their  fitting  home  in  London  or  a  University  town. 
The  Story  of  an  African  Farm  is  a  book  of  two  parts. 
Whatever  the  value  of  the  transcendental  musings,  these 
are  a  matter  of  small  moment  in  comparison  with  the 
art  and  beauty  of  the  narrative. 

Nothing  that  Olive  Schreiner  has  since  written  is  of 
equal  importance  or  interest.  Dreams  (1891)  and  Dream 
Life  and  Real  Life  (1893)  contain  idylls  and  dream  fantasies 
carrying  an  ethical  or  spiritual  meaning.  But  the  best 
of  her  later  writings  is  Trooper  Peter  Halket  of  Mashona- 
land  (1897),  an  allegory  in  which  Christ  appears  to  a 
trooper  lost  on  the  veldt  and  shows  him  the  evil  works 
of  Cecil  Rhodes  and  the  Chartered  Company  in  shooting 
natives,  burning  kraals  and  forcing  native  labour.  In 
simplicity  and  eloquence  of  style  it  is  a  pamphlet  of  rare 
distinction.  The  attack  was  not  allowed  to  pass  un- 
answered. In  The  Resurrection  of  Peter  (1900)  Princess 
Radziwill  writes  of  another  Christ  who  appears  and 
demolishes  his  predecessor's  arguments  by  explaining  the 
gospel  of  imperialistic  Christianity.  Throughout  the 
retort  the  trooper's  surname  is  misspelt. 

With  one  exception  the  later  writings  of  Olive  Schreiner 
fall  far  below  the  level  of  her  first  book  ;  and  they  are 
scarcely  more  than  occasional  pieces.  In  the  Story  of 
an  African  Farm  she  seems  to  have  exhausted  her  powers 
of  drawing  on  any  scale  from  observation  and  experience. 
Latterly  her  interest  has  been  almost  entirely  diverted 
to  etliical  and  political  questions  ;  and  even  her  first  book 
would  probably  not  have  been  written  save  as  a  garment 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  429 

to  clothe  the  argument  between  belief  and  unbelief.  As 
a  novel  and  a  work  of  art  it  is  successful  despite  the 
intention  of  the  authoress.  The  question  of  woman's 
place  in  society  is  also,  as  already  has  been  hinted,  a 
subsidiary  part  of  the  book's  ethical  implication  ;  and 
this  is  almost  the  whole  business  of  Sarah  Grand's  novels. 

Sarah  Grand  (Mrs.  Frances  Elizabeth  M'Fall)  has 
asserted  that  "  The  '  novel  with  a  purpose '  and  the 
'  sex  novel  '  are  more  powerful  at  the 
Sarah  Grand,  present  time,  especially  for  good,  than 
b.  1862.  any  other  social  influence."  And  she 

takes  comfort  in  the  thought  that  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward  has  a  thousand  readers  to  Stevenson's 
one.  She  herself  has  written  several  novels  with  a  purpose 
advocating  what  is  vaguely  known  as  the  woman  move- 
ment. She  is  anxious  that  woman  should  enjoy  a  better 
social  and  moral  relationship  with  man  in  order  that 
the  race  may  be  bettered.  "  Emancipated  women  con- 
sider motherhood  the  most  important  function  of  their 
lives.  .  .  .  For  this  reason  they  have  begun  to  demand 
a  much  higher  standard  of  morals  and  physique  than 
usual  to  satisfy  them  in  their  husbands."  Ideala  (1888), 
like  Grant  Allen's  Woman  Who  Did,  is  an  outspoken  sex 
novel.  Ideala,  the  eccentric,  original  and  independent 
woman,  with  a  weakness  for  uttering  moral  maxims  and 
plunging  into  lengthy  monologue,  falls  in  love  with  a 
man  other  than  her  indifferent  and  faithless  husband. 
She  determines  to  form  a  free  union,  but  realises  in  time 
that  even  were  this  course  justifiable  to  her,  it  might  by 
other  people  be  used  as  an  example  to  provide  them  with 
specious  excuses  for  their  own  ends,  and  she  refuses.  At 
this  moment  the  truth  of  the  maxim  she  utters  much 
earlier  in  the  book — "  Unfortunately  there  appears  to  be 
no  neutral  ground  for  us  women  :  we  either  do  good  or 
harm" — is  borne  in  upon  her.  Ideala  is  a  tract  rather 
than  a  novel.  It  has  none  of  the  dramatic  interest  of 
The  Woman  Who  Did ;  and  the  chief  function  of  the 
heroine  is  to  utter  lengthy  comments  upon  life.  Art  in 
the  telling  of  the  narrative  there  is  none ;  but  the 
hortatory  matter  is  relieved  by  abundance  of  epigram  and 
illuminating  humour. 

Sarah  Grand's  best  known  work,  The  Heavenly  Twins 


430  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

(1893),  even  more  pertinently  illustrates  her  incompetence 
as  a  story-teller.  The  narrative  wanders  by  devious  paths, 
and  the  whole  leaves  upon  the  mind  a  sense  of  utter 
formlessness.  The  escapades  of  the  twins  are  subordinated 
to  the  story  of  the  woman  who  discovers  her  husband's 
past  the  moment  after  marriage,  and  forthright  refuses 
to  live  with  him.  Evadne  is  the  typical  illustration  of 
Sarah  Grand's  contention  that  woman  must  henceforth 
demand  in  man  the  same  standard  of  morality  as  she 
expects  in  her  sisters.  The  narrative  is  surcharged  with 
ethical  implication  and  moral  discourses  which  are  but 
clumsily  united  to  the  action  of  the  story.  The  whole 
book  may  be  described  as  disorganised  diorama.  Never- 
theless it  has  the  force  of  strong  individuality  and  the 
personal  point  of  view  ;  and  the  humour  is  of  the  best, 
springing  from  the  characters  and  illustrating  them  ;  it 
is  not  merely  an  embellishment  to  the  narrative. 

In  the  art  of  narrative  The  Beth  Book  (1897)  is  greatly 
superior  to  The  Heavenly  Twins.  Beth  is  another  exemplar 
of  the  new  woman.  Her  story  from  childhood  to  married 
life  is  carried  forward  in  clear  sequence.  Bobs  the  Impos- 
sible (1901)  is  the  study  of  a  type  of  girlhood  and  the 
contact  of  a  young  woman  with  the  world.  The  short 
stories  of  Emotional  Moments  (1908)  were  many  of  them 
written  at  a  somewhat  earlier  date.  They  illustrate 
varying  moods  and  emotions  in  the  feminine  mind. 

In  art  of  narrative  and  in  the  faculty  of  presenting  a 
large  number  of  characters  in  interaction  with  each  other 
Sarah  Grand  has  given  us  her  best  work  in  Adnam's 
Orchard  (1912).  It  is  a  book  far  less  argumentative  than 
her  earlier  tales,  though  sidelights  upon  questions  of  sex, 
the  position  of  woman,  the  relationship  of  rich  and  poor 
are  by  no  means  absent ;  nor  has  the  author  shaken  off 
the  habit  of  turning  from  her  tale  to  address  the  reader. 
But  the  story  is  left  to  produce  its  own  effect,  without 
exegetical  commentary,  and  with  a  greater  freedom  than 
Sarah  Grand  has  hitherto  allowed  to  it.  The  background 
also  is  new  ;  for  Adnarns  Orchard  is  a  picture  of  rural 
life,  contrasting  labourers,  farmers,  yeomanry,  with  the 
landed  and  titled  classes.  Adnam,  the  pioneer  of  intensive 
culture  in  his  neighbourhood,  his  father  and  mother,  Ella 
Banks,  the  lacemaker,  the  yokels  in  the  inn  parlour  and 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  431 

the  household  at  the  castle  are  all  drawn  with  greater 
truth  and  impersonality  than  the  authoress  has  succeeded 
in  reaching  in  any  of  her  earlier  books. 

Sarah  Grand  is  a  woman  of  strong  intellectual  force  ; 
she  has  humour  and  an  eye  observant  of  human  nature ; 
she  is  possessed  by  a  sincere  indignation  at  the  disadvan- 
tages under  which  she  imagines  woman  to  labour  in  a 
society  made  by  man  for  himself.  She  adopts  the  form 
of  the  novel,  because,  apart  from  pulpit  and  platform, 
it  is  the  surest  and  most  direct  means  of  appeal  to  the  great 
mass  of  those  who  can  be  stirred  to  thought  upon  any 
question.  She  is  not  wholly  without  the  art  of  character- 
drawing,  but  it  may  be  doubted  whether  she  has  any  true 
sympathy  with  men  and  women  apart  from  the  ideals 
and  conceptions  they  illustrate  to  her.  Her  women, 
Ideala,  Beth,  Evadne,  are  not  so  much  women  as  idealisa- 
tions of  the  new  woman  ;  and  in  complexity  of  character 
interest  she  has  done  her  best  work  in  Adnam's  Orchard, 
in  which  she  is  least  possessed  with  the  spirit  of  the 
reformer.  Yet,  with  all  her  faults  as  an  artist,  her 
didacticism,  her  total  lack  of  any  sense  of  form,  her  out- 
bursts of  exaggerated  diatribe,  her  novels,  like  those  of 
George  Egerton,  stand  for  something  individual  and 
distinctive  in  the  expanse  of  feminine  fiction.  The  thought 
is  intense,  sincere  and  consistent.  The  moral  inspiration 
of  her  ideals  and  convictions  is  without  a  doubt.  It 
would  have  been  well  had  her  genuine  gift  of  humour 
saved  her  from  some  of  those  uncontrolled  statements 
which  are  near  neighbours  to  the  shriek  of  Trafalgar 
Square.  Even  in  the  most  equable  of  her  books,  Adnam's 
Orchard,  she  can  close  a  long  passage  of  commentary  with 
the  childish  assertion  that,  "  When  man  legislates  for 
woman,  it  is  not  the  brute  in  him  that  prevails,  it  is  the 
devil."  Fortunately  these  hysterical  lapses  are  few  ;  and 
her  better  mind  is  expressed  in  words  which  are  the  ground- 
work of  all  her  writing  : 

"  Personally  I  believe  that  the  woman  movement  is  a 
great  effort  of  the  human  race,  an  evolutionary  effort, 
to  raise  itself  a  step  higher  in  the  scale  of  development ; 
and  this  conviction  forced  itself  upon  me  when  I  found 
that,  beneath  the  surface,  earnest  and  intelligent  women 


482  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

were  everywhere  expressing  great  dissatisfaction  at  the 
present  haphazard  of  marriage  and  maternity." 
George  Egerton  (Mrs.  Golding  Bright)  is  to  be  counted 
in  the  same  group  of  women  novelists,  for  though  in  her 
earliest  and  best  tales  she  was  a  disciple 
George  Egerton.  of  the  French  naturalistic  school,  she 
writes  with  a  moral  purpose  and  to 
advocate  a  fuller  and  franker  equality  of  the  sexes.  Many 
years  ago  a  daily  paper  declared  of  her  that  she  wrote 
with  "  the  least  amount  of  literary  skill,  and  the  worst 
literary  taste."  The  statement  serves  to  illustrate  the 
blindness  of  the  average  reviewer  to  the  work  of  an 
author  who  is  sincerely  attempting  to  present  life  with 
no  eye  to  the  common  market  standard  of  fiction  in 
the  day.  George  Egerton's  contributions  to  the  Yellow 
Book  and  her  early  short  stories  single  her  out  as  the 
feminine  counterpart  of  Hubert  Crackanthorpe ;  and  this 
is  high  praise.  Her  writing  reflects  an  original  mind,  a 
power  to  draw  upon  observation,  and  it  is  in  tales  of 
close  realism  or  in  the  psychological  study  of  souls  which 
have  sinned  and  suffered  that  she  is  most  successful.  In 
the  imaginative  realisation  of  beauty  she  is  wanting  ; 
and  for  this  reason  the  moral  fairy-tales  of  Fantasias 
(1898)  fail  of  their  purpose — they  lack  charm,  the  style 
of  the  author  is  not  suited  to  the  subject.  In  Symphonies 
(1897)  the  redemption  of  life  through  hopes,  ideals,  affec- 
tions and  the  tender  sympathy  that  comes  of  blighted 
ambitions  is  drawn  with  true  feeling  ;  although  these 
tales  impress  upon  the  reader  the  conviction  that  life 
is  a  strangely  a-symphonic  affair.  The  volume  contains 
much  good  work.  Among  its  best  tales  are  '  The  Captain's 
Book,'  the  story  of  an  ineffective  dreamer  who  never 
wrote  the  great  book  that  was  the  nursling  of  a  lifelong 
imagining,  and  '  Oony,'  a  pathetic  story  of  Irish  life. 

George  Egerton's  strongest  work  is,  however,  contained 
in  the  harsh  and  unshrinking  realism  of  an  earlier  book, 
Discords  (1894).  '  Wedlock,'  an  extraordinary  and  almost 
repulsive  story,  which  might  have  come  from  Gorky, 
compels  admiration  for  its  truth  in  observation  and  its 
fidelity  in  detail.  In  a  different  mode  '  Gone  Under  '  is  a 
fine  piece  of  psychological  insight,  though  it  illustrates 
the  author's  want  of  brevity  and  entire  relevance  in  the 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  433 

use  of  every  detail,  so  admirable  in  the  work  of 
Crackanthorpe.  And  in  her  later  stories  and  sketches 
the  fault  of  diffuseness  grows  upon  George  Egerton.  But 
for  a  few  years  in  the  early  'nineties  hardly  anyone  was 
doing  better,  stronger  and  more  sincere  work  than  she. 

Her  later  books,  which  are  less  distinctive  of  her  genius, 
may  be  noted  briefly.  Rosa  Amoroso,  (1901),  a  book  of 
woman's  love  letters,  appeared  shortly  after  Mr.  Laurence 
Housman's  Englishwoman's  Love  Letters,  although  they 
were  written  before  its  publication.  They  reveal  a  woman 
more  human  and  lovable  than  the  tediously  self-conscious 
being  of  Mr.  Housman's  letters.  The  letters  themselves 
are  strong,  simple  and  unaffected.  The  sketches  and 
stories  of  Flies  in  Amber  (1905)  are  hardly  up  to  the 
standard  of  the  early  tales.  George  Egerton  has  fallen 
further  into  a  tendency,  to  which  she  was  always  prone, 
of  telling  a  story  by  fluttering  flights  about  its  centre  ; 
and  she  has  lost  the  fine  directness  of  her  earlier  style. 

It  is  the  misfortune  of  some  women  writers  that  they 
cannot  treat  questions  of  sex  without  exaggeration  or 

morbid  obsession  with  a  single  idea.  Sarah 
Iota,  Grand's  humour  does  not  save  her  from  this 

b.  1856.  failing.     George  Egerton  knows  the  world  of 

men  and  women  better ;  and,  therefore, 
though  she  deals  realistically  with  sordid  scenes  and 
characters  there  is  no  taint  of  morbidity  in  her  writing  : 
and  this  is  equally  true  of  the  problem  novels  of  Iota 
(Mrs.  Kathleen  Caffyn).  Her  first  book,  A  Yellow  Aster 
(1894),  gave  her  a  reputation.  Two  years  before  Miss 
Corelli's  Mighty  Atom  it  chose  for  its  subject  the  exclusion 
of  religious  teaching  from  the  education  of  children. 
Thereafter  the  story  tells  of  the  growth  of  love  through 
maternity  in  the  daughter  of  unparental  scientists.  It 
is  a  thoughtful  piece  of  work,  though  characterisation 
and  plot  sequence  leave  much  to  be  desired.  The  latter 
part  of  the  narrative  is,  however,  better  conceived  and 
carried  through  than  the  earlier.  In  cohesion  and  clear- 
ness Children  of  Circumstance  (1894)  loses  much.  It  has 
all  the  appearance  of  having  been  written  before  its 
predecessor,  although  the  characterisation  is  more  subtle 
and  calls  for  greater  attention.  The  narrative  turns  upon 
the  stale  familiarity  of  a  wedded  pair  who  find  it  impossible 


434  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

to  overcome  the  incompatibility  of  their  characters.    The 
best  of  lota's  later  books  are  Anne  Maulverer  (1899),  a 
fine  study  painted  in  strong,  sure  touches,  and  Patricia 
(1905),  a  problem  in  contrast  between  a  woman  and  her 
daughter-in-law,  whom  she  misunderstands.    Nor  does  one 
of  her  latest  books,  The  Fire-seeker  (1911),  fall  behind  these 
in  the  faithfulness  with  which  she  treats  the  interaction 
of  character  with  character.    lota's  work  is  always  worthy 
a  careful  reading  ;    for  she  has  no  irrational  preposses- 
sions,  she  sees  life  clearly,   simply  and  in  the  light  of 
humour,  and  she  has  a  wide  knowledge  of  men  and  women 
in  different  parts  of  the  world.     Her  entire  interest  is 
with  the  soul  in  crisis  and  development,  and  in  dramatic 
quality  her  narrative  largely  fails.    Her  dialogue  also  is  some- 
times prolix ;  the  bearing  of  her  narrative  is  occasionally 
obscure ;  but  her  character-drawing  is  nearly  always  good. 
When  Elizabeth  Robins  (Mrs.  George  Richmond  Parks) 
embraced  the   "  woman  movement  "   she  did  her  work 
as    a    novelist    irreparable    injury.     Her 
Elizabeth  Robins,  best    writing    was    all    done    before    she 
was  troubled  with  questions  of  sex  and 
the  place  of  woman  in  the  social  order.     She  was  born 
and  educated  in  America,  and  first  made  a  name  for  her- 
self as  an  actress,  especially  as  an  interpreter  of  Ibsen's 
heroines.     Her  first  novels,  George  Mandeville's  Husband 
(1894),    The    New    Man    (1895),    Below    the    Salt    (1896) 
and  The  Open  Question  (1898)  were  written  under  the 
pen-name  of  C.   E.   Raimond.     But   in    1904    she   pub- 
lished under  her  own  name  the  powerful  Magnetic  North. 
The    earlier   novels    are    chiefly   studies    of  problems    in 
modern  social  life  ;   though  Below  the  Salt  consists  chiefly 
of  farcical  sketches  of  life  below  stairs.     In  The  Open 
Question  Elizabeth  Robins  took  up  a  problem  dear  to  the 
heart   of   Ibsen,    and   probably    suggested   by   him,    the 
influence  of  heredity.     The  lovers  of  the  story  are  two 
cousins  with  the  seed    of   consumption    in  them.     The 
earlier    novels    exhibit    the    chief    characteristics    which 
belong  to  the  later — the  intellectual  force  of  the  writer, 
her  interest   in   questions   concerning  her  sex,   and   the 
almost  masculine  attitude  of  her  mind. 

The  last  named  characteristic  becomes  more  pronounced 
in  those  books  in  which  she  abandoned  a  pseudonym, 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  435 

The  Magnetic  North  breaks  new  ground.  The  au- 
thoress made  herself  acquainted  with  the  details  of 
the  Klondyke  gold-rush ;  and  her  story,  which  fal  s 
naturally  into  three  parts,  traces  the  history  of  five  men 
and  their  disillusion  with  the  land  whither  they  came 
hoping  for  wealth.  The  Magnetic  North  is  no  tale  of 
adventure  ;  it  is  largely  written  in  dialogue,  and  it  digresses 
with  unpardonable  frequency.  But  the  characters  of  the 
Kentucky  Colonel,  the  agnostic  Boy  and  the  woman 
Maudie,  are  brilliantly  and  sympathetically  delineated. 
Four  years  later  Elizabeth  Robins  followed  The  Magnetic 
North  with  another  tale,  Come  and  Find  Me  I  (1908),  in 
which  the  scene  is  laid  partly  in  California  and  partly 
in  Alaska.  The  two,  in  their  open-air  and  romantic 
character,  are  remarkable  books  for  a  woman  to  write  ; 
and  it  is  not  surprising  that  the  C.  E.  Raimond  of  the 
earlier  novels  was  mistaken  for  a  man. 

Unfortunately  at  this  stage  Elizabeth  Robins  chose  to 
become  more  definitely  a  novelist  with  a  purpose.  In 
1907  she  wrote  The  Convert,  a  document  in  the  form  of 
fiction  upholding  the  cause  of  women's  suffrage.  In  the 
same  year  she  composed  a  play,  Votes  for  Women.  And 
in  1912  came  a  lurid  tract,  Where  are  you  going  to  .  .  .  ?, 
an  extravagantly  coloured  picture  of  the  white-slave 
traffic,  which  appeared  during  one  of  those  periods  of 
moral  indignation  which  seize  the  English  public,  and 
it  enjoyed,  therefore,  a  notoriety  it  did  not  deserve  either 
as  a  novel  or  as  a  faithful  picture  of  the  evil  it  delineated. 

It  is  in  the  work  of  her  middle  period  that  Elizabeth 
Robins  writes  at  her  best,  in  The  Open  Question,  The 
Magnetic  North,  A  Dark  Lantern  (1905)  and  Come  and 
Find  Me  !  These  are  novels  built  upon  observation  and 
clear,  unprejudiced  thinking.  They  are  written  also  with 
a  steadiness  and  sincerity  of  intention,  a  close  grasp  of 
essentials,  and  an  interest  in  the  life  of  action  and  the 
open  air,  which  lend  them  the  character  of  work  by  a 
man  rather  than  a  woman.  The  proportion  of  dialogue 
to  direct  narrative  is  very  large  in  all  her  books.  And 
yet  she  eschews  the  attempt  to  write  brilliantly.  Her 
people  talk  as  we  believe  they  would.  Her  dialogue  is 
remarkably  realistic  and  handled  with  great  skill  in 
carrying  the  narrative  forward.  Her  drawing  of  character 


436  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

is  broad  and  objective,  unlike  the  detailed  and  more 
complicated  manner  of  many  women  novelists.  If  in 
anything  Elizabeth  Robins'  narrative  is  wanting  in  back- 
ground. Even  in  The  Magnetic  North  the  Alaskan  wilder- 
ness is  sketched  in  with  a  bare  sufficiency  of  line  and 
colour.  There  is  not  the  slightest  suggestion  of  intimate 
acquaintance  with  or  a  love  of  the  wilds.  The  river, 
the  hills,  Dawson  City  and  the  snows  are  paint  and 
pasteboard,  like  a  piece  of  stage  scenery.  In  these  pictures 
of  the  north  Elizabeth  Robins  challenges  comparison  with 
the  wonderful  and  vivid  painting  of  Jack  London,  and 
it  is  a  comparison  she  cannot  sustain. 

With  Elizabeth  Robins  Miss  May  Sinclair  exhibits 
toward  life  an  attitude  curiously  masculine,  yet 
marked  by  traits  which  are  patently 
May  Sinclair.  feminine.  No  man  could  find  so  con- 
tinuous a  source  of  interest  in  the  psy- 
chology of  irregular  relationships  as  Miss  Sinclair  dis- 
covers. The  masculine  mind  is  more  objective  and 
indifferent  where  men  and  women  are  concerned  ;  even 
the  nervous  French  temperament  is  not  obsessed  in  the 
same  way.  Nor  again  does  the  ordinary  masculine  writer 
make  that  parade  of  learned  lore  which  Miss  Sinclair 
presents  for  our  admiration  in  The  Divine  Fire  (1904). 
In  like  manner  Miss  M.  P.  Willcocks,  to  choose  but  one 
example  of  another  living  writer,  often  goes  far  to  reduce 
to  tedium  a  dramatic  story  by  loading  it  with  masses  of 
irrelevant  knowledge. 

Miss  Sinclair  wishes  to  make  us  feel  the  incongruity 
between  the  soul  of  the  shopkeeper-poet  and  his  sur- 
roundings, but  in  so  doing  she  burdens  the  narrative 
with  an  unnecessary  weight  of  learning.  This  is  a  fault 
in  art.  The  obsession  of  her  narrative  in  The  Divine  Fire, 
Kitty  Tailleur  (1908)  and  The  Combined  Maze  (1913)  with 
the  sensuous  side  of  sexual  relationship  is  a  fault  in 
balance  and  judgment.  Women  fair  and  frail  the  world 
has  always  known  ;  but  Miss  Sinclair's  erring  women  are 
false  to  reality  in  their  entire  want  of  prudential  con- 
sideration and  self-knowledge.  Neither  in  aberration  or 
in  penitence  are  they  credible.  Their  motives  are  hard 
to  read,  their  actions  causeless,  and  we  imagine  that  Miss 
Sinclair,  like  the  Brontes,  confuses  sensationalism  with 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  487 

realistic  strength.  In  style  and  in  the  conduct  of  the 
narrative  she  is  only  too  prone  to  lay  on  her  colours 
thickly  and  crudely.  The  Divine  Fire  and  The  Creators 
(1910)  are  hymns  to  literary  genius,  in  which  the  fine 
frenzy  of  the  creative  artist  is  laboured  to  weariness. 
It  is  well  to  remember  that  great  artists,  from  Shake- 
speare to  Rodin,  have  been  comparatively  sober  and 
ordinary  human  beings.  And,  though  she  is  capable  of 
simple  writing,  Miss  Sinclair  can  be  as  rhetorical  and 
bombastic  as  Charlotte  Bronte  at  her  worst.  Her  excellent 
book  on  the  Brontes  is  disfigured  by  purple  patches  of 
rodomontade  ;  and  her  novels  often  suffer  in  the  same 
way.  If,  for  example,  she  wishes  to  inform  us  of  the 
simple  fact  that  reviewers  were  changing  their  attitude 
toward  the  work  of  George  Tanqueray  she  writes  : 

"  They  postured  now  in  attitudes  of  prudery  and 
terror  ;  they  protested  ;  they  proclaimed  themselves 
victims  of  diabolic  power,  worshippers  of  the  purity, 
the  sanctity  of  English  letters,  constrained  to  an  act 
of  unholy  propitiation." 

Disproportion  more  ludicrous  between  words  and  the 
meaning  they  are  intended  to  convey  it  is  difficult  to 
conceive.  Fortunately  Miss  Sinclair  is  learning  a  more 
guarded  restraint.  The  Combined  Maze,  the  story  of  the 
heroic  bearing  of  a  London  clerk  under  tragic  marriage 
conditions,  is  told  with  a  rapidity  and  directness  which 
is  more  effective  by  far  than  the  manner  of  her  ambitious 
novels. 

It  would  seem  a  difficulty  for  the  intellectual  woman 
who  is  also  an  artist  to  combine  these  two  sides  of  her 
nature.  George  Eliot's  later  work  breaks  down  under 
the  stress  of  conflict  between  intellect  and  imagination. 
And  in  Miss  Sinclair  the  same  absence  of  equipoise  is 
apparent.  Intellect  often  masters  her  art.  When,  as  in 
The  Combined  Maze,  she  is  compelled  to  write  of  the 
ordinary  and  unintellectual  experiences  of  life  she  is  saved 
from  her  besetting  temptation. 

To  a  certain  extent  the  faults  charged  against  the  work 
of  Miss  Sinclair  are  also  the  failings  of  an  able  writer, 
Miss  M.  P.  Willcocks,  whose  books  have  their  setting 
in  the  West  Country.  In  no  case,  however,  have  her 


488  THE  NOVEL  (PART  rt 

tales  any  essential  connection  with  place ;  they  are  not, 
like  the  novels  of  John  Trevena  or  Mr.  Eden  Phillpotts, 

tales  of  the  people  and  the  soil.  In 
M.  P.  Willcocks,  any  other  environment  the  characters, 
b.  1869.  with  slight  modification,  would  equally 

be  real  beings.  Widdicombe  (1905)  first 
made  her  name  known.  The  Wingless  Victory  (1907)  and 
A  Man  of  Genius  (1908)  further  enhanced  her  reputation  ; 
and  The  Power  Behind  (1913)  enjoyed  an  even  greater 
popularity.  Miss  Willcocks'  novels  in  intention,  and  to 
some  degree  in  accomplishment,  are  set  far  above  the 
common  standard  of  the  popular  novel.  She  is  sincere, 
conscientious,  painstaking  and  a  woman  of  wide  know- 
ledge. But  she  cannot  restrain  herself  from  emptying 
dead  knowledge,  whether  relevant  or  irrelevant  to  the 
action,  into  the  pages  of  her  narrative.  She  is  hard- 
working, thoughtful,  intellectual,  and  these  gifts  she  uses 
to  the  best  advantage  ;  but  her  power  as  an  artist  is  not 
in  proportion  to  her  endeavour. 

Miss    Beatrice   Harraden    is    another  writer  who  may 
more  distantly  be  included  in  the  "  woman  movement." 
She    was    twenty-nine   when    she    won 
Beatrice  Harraden,  fame    with    Ships     That     Pass    in    the 
b.  1864.  Night    (1893),     a     book    which    had    a 

phenomenal  sale.  The  popularity  of  the 
tale  was  due  to  its  sentimental  ethics  and  simple  piety, 
lures  which  never  fail  to  find  response  in  the  great 
middle  class  of  the  British  public.  Bernadine,  the  self- 
centred  English  girl,  learns  the  lesson  of  everyday  dutiful- 
ness  in  the  scenes  of  pathos  and  misery  which  she  witnesses 
in  a  foreign  Kurhaus.  She  comes  home,  after  touching 
the  heart  of  the  most  disagreeable  man  in  the  English 
colony,  to  brighten  the  life  of  her  old  uncle.  She  dies  in 
consequence  of  an  accident,  but  duly  fulfils  her  part  by 
leaving  an  edifying  message  behind  her.  The  languid 
story  has  little  merit  either  in  style  or  characterisation. 
Hilda  Strafford  (1897),  a  tale  of  no  great  length,  illustrates 
in  another  way  the  same  lesson  in  conduct.  A  selfish 
wife  fails  to  realise  her  duty  of  love  and  helpfulness  toward 
her  husband.  In  Katharine  Frensham  (1903)  the  moral 
is  diverted  in  the  contrary  direction — the  beautiful  nature 
of  the  heroine  wins  a  moral  victory  over  the  sensitive 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  439 

and  irritable  hero.  Out  of  the  Wreck  I  Rise  (1912)  is  a 
longer,  a  more  ambitious  and  a  more  successful,  but  in 
no  wise  a  remarkable  book.  A  part  of  the  narrative  is 
founded  upon  a  recent  and  well-known  case  of  embezzle- 
ment by  a  dramatic  agent.  Adrian  Steele,  in  the  story, 
defrauds  his  clients  ;  but  under  the  influence  of  a  mystical 
clergyman  and  other  friends  he  reaches  a  better  frame  of 
mind.  Unfortunately  a  careless  avalanche  buries  him 
and  his  hopes  of  a  nobler  life.  Both  title  and  the  plot 
motif — discovery  of  the  true  self  and  instant  death — are 
borrowed  from  Browning. 

The  sentiment  and  ethical  faith  of  Miss  Beatrice  Har- 
raden's  tales  have  touched  the  heart  of  many  thousands 
of  English  readers  in  this  and  other  lands.  Her  gifts  as 
a  writer  are,  however,  slight.  She  has  little  invention  or 
imagination  ;  and  as  a  stylist  she  can  make  no  claim. 
At  the  most  it  may  be  said  that  her  tales  are  wholesome 
and  do  not  offend  against  likelihood  and  probability. 

Lucas  Malet  (Mrs.  Mary  St.  Leger  Harrison)  is  also  to 
be  counted  with  writers  of  the  feminine  emancipation ; 
but  not  wholly,  for  she  is  not  a  writer 
Lucas  Malet,  obsessed  with  a  few  ideas,  and  her  work 
b.  1852.  exhibits  a  wide  range  of  experiment  in 

diverse  directions.  She  is  a  daughter  of 
Charles  Kingsley  and  was  born  at  Eversley  Rectory.  In 
1876  she  married  William  Harrison,  Rector  of  Clovelly, 
and  a  few  years  later  published  her  first  novel,  Mrs. 
Lorimer  (1882).  For  a  first  attempt  it  is  a  finely  written 
book ;  the  technique  is  good,  the  style  is  clean  and 
vigorous.  The  story  is  not  in  itself  remarkable — a  young 
widow  rejects  a  new  love  for  a  life  of  good  works  devoted 
to  the  memory  of  her  dead  husband.  There  is,  however, 
one  powerful  scene  in  the  picture  of  Fred  Wharton's 
proposal  to  Mrs.  Lorimer.  Lucas  Malet  followed  her  first 
novel  with  Colonel  Enderby's  Wife  (1885),  Little  Peter  (1887), 
an  idyll  of  country  life  with  sketches  of  country  characters, 
and  A  Counsel  of  Perfection  (1888),  which  has  a  theme 
out  of  the  common  in  its  representation  of  a  middle-aged 
woman's  impulse  to  love  a  man  unworthy  of  her.  It  is 
a  curious  and  fascinating  tale.  But  it  was  first  with  her 
outstanding  novel,  The  Wages  of  Sin  (1891),  that  Lucas 
Malet  won  wide  recognition.  The  tale — a  rising  artist 


440  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

falls  into  youthful  indiscretion  and  pays  the  penalty  in 
the  ruin  of  his  hopes  when  he  attempts  in  later  years 
to  rise  to  a  better  and  cleaner  life — is  developed  with 
forcible  realism  and  skilful  concentration  in  the  sequence 
of  events.  The  tragic  intensity  of  the  story  is  relieved 
with  gleams  of  ironic  humour,  the  characters  are  carefully 
and  strongly  contrasted,  the  style  is  consistent  and  clear. 
In  craftsmanship  The  Wages  of  Sin  is  not  only  Lucas 
Malet's  best  book ;  it  is  a  novel  that  rises  far  above  the 
level  of  contemporary  fiction.  Had  the  authoress  written 
nothing  else  this  book  alone  would  serve  to  give  her  an 
honourable  and  distinctive  place.  In  nothing  that  she 
has  written  since  has  she  surpassed  her  work  here. 

The  Carissima  (1896)  is  a  tale  in  another  and  farcical 
vein  of  comedy ;  and  The  Gateless  Barrier  (1900),  a  tale 
of  psychic  mystery,  treats  of  the  supernatural  and  has 
little  to  do  with  everyday  reality.  The  History  of  Sir 
Richard  Calmady  (1901)  won  popularity,  a  popularity  due 
doubtless  to  the  uncommonness  of  the  theme — the  rake's 
progress  of  a  crippled  baronet — and  the  sensuous  appeal 
of  several  chapters  in  the  tale.  But  Calmady  is  only  too 
obviously  a  figure  of  melodrama  in  the  worst  manner  of 
Dumas  ;  and  Lucas  Malet  adopts  a  literary  artifice  hi 
style  which  is  a  deliberate  experiment  with  the  pen  rather 
than  straightforward  writing.  As  a  true  work  of  art, 
reflecting  life  and  character,  it  will  bear  no  comparison 
with  The  Wages  of  Sin.  The  allusive  and  less  direct 
manner  of  writing  adopted  in  Sir  Richard  Calmady,  a 
manner  in  part,  doubtless,  borrowed  from  Meredith, 
persists  in  a  greater  or  less  degree  in  her  later  books. 
Adrian  Savage  (1911),  a  thoughtful  but  unnecessarily 
lengthy  piece  of  writing,  does  not  escape  this  tendency. 
The  chief  character  is  a  man  of  letters,  half  English,  half 
French,  and  the  scene  is  laid  partly  in  Paris,  partly  in 
the  south  of  England.  It  is  one  of  the  large  number  of 
'novels  belonging  to  the  feminist  movement,  novels  which 
have  for  their  object  not  only  the  study  of  character  but 
a  critical  analysis  of  the  most  modern  complications  in 
religion,  art,  politics  and  the  relationship  of  the  sexes, 
novels  that  miss  their  end  by  an  overwrought  intensity 
and  seriousness. 

The  character  of  Lucas  Malet's  work  cannot  be  readily 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  441 

or  briefly  summarised.  She  is  versatile,  she  is  widely- 
travelled,  she  has  many  interests,  and  though  the  degree 
of  her  success  varies  as  she  writes  in  different  modes, 
she  never  fails  completely  through  mistaking  her  inten- 
tion or  her  powers.  Her  temper  turns  most  naturally 
toward  a  direct  realism,  but,  as  The  Gateless  Barrier  bears 
witness,  the  supernatural  and  the  mystical  are  not  unknown 
to  her.  Her  style,  save  when  she  becomes  imitative,  is 
terse  and  strong  ;  and  she  has  a  knack  of  apposite  humour. 
Her  quality  as  a  writer  is  seen  at  its  best  in  The  Wages 
of  Sin.  In  her  later  work  she  is  far  above  the  ordinary 
range,  but  she  is  not  guiltless  of  writing  to  a  standard 
expected  of  her  instead  of  expressing  what  she  feels  and 
is  compelled  to  utter. 

It  is  even  more  difficult  to  range  John  Oliver  Hobbes 
(Mrs.  Pearl  Mary  Teresa  Craigie)  with  any  school  of 

writers.  She  was  a  modern  woman, 
John  Oliver  Hobbes,  intellectually  interested  in  all  ques- 
1867-1906.  tions  of  the  day ;  but  she  was  far 

from  being  the  purely  analytic  and 
didactic  novelist :  wit,  fantasy  and  intellectual  comedy 
are  the  most  marked  characteristics  of  her  work. 
Although  in  certain  aspects  of  her  writing  she  is  re- 
lated to  the  group  of  women  novelists  denned  above, 
she  is  not  wholly  of  that  group.  In  epigrammatic  wit, 
in  ideas  and  the  fruitfulness  of  her  comments  upon 
character  and  social  life  John  Oliver  Hobbes  has  no  exact 
parallel  among  contemporary  authoresses.  Her  terse 
force  and  pointed  wit  were,  doubtless,  due  in  a  measure  to 
reaction  against  a  life  embittered  by  an  unhappy  marriage 
and  the  underlying  seriousness  of  temperament  of  a 
woman  who  gave  a  large  part  of  her  waking  hours  to 
the  claims  of  fashionable  society,  though  she  recognised 
the  emptiness  of  its  pursuits  and  the  waste  in  its 
monotonous  efforts  to  bridge  the  hours.  Literature  was 
with  Mrs.  Craigie  an  adopted  profession,  she  fell  back 
upon  writing  in  order  to  forget ;  but  she  also  came  with 
a  vocation  to  the  art  of  writing. 

John  Oliver  Hobbes  was  born  in  New  England,  but 
within  a  few  months  of  her  birth  her  parents  brought 
her  to  London  where  they  settled,  and,  though  she  never 
forgot  her  American  origin,  London  became  her  home 


442  THE  NOVEL  [PART  TV 

to  the  end  of  her  life.  In  her  twentieth  year  she  married 
Mr.  Reginald  Walpole  Craigie.  The  marriage  proved  a 
mistake  ;  she  soon  left  her  husband,  and  in  1895  obtained 
a  divorce.  The  distress  of  mind  through  which  she  passed 
in  these  years  led  her  to  seek  spiritual  consolation,  and 
in  1892  she  was  received  into  the  Church  of  Rome. 

Before  the  break  with  her  husband  she  began  to  write, 
and  in  1891  made  her  mark  with  the  short  tale  Some 
Emotions  and  a  Moral,  which  appeared  in  Fisher  Unwin's 
"  Pseudonym  Library."  On  the  title-page  of  the  volume 
she  adopted  the  nom  de  plume  of  John  Oliver  Hobbes. 
In  England  alone  six  thousand  copies  were  sold  in  the 
first  year  and  forty  thousand  before  her  death.  The 
fascination  of  the  book  lies  in  its  brilliant,  acute  and 
epigrammatic  dialogue,  and  the  cynical  humour  of  its 
comments  upon  life.  The  narrative  is  of  little  importance, 
and  the  characters  are  wholly  subservient  to  epigram  ; 
but  it  is  impossible  to  read  the  opening  dialogue  without 
being  caught  by  the  allusive  vivacity  of  the  writing. 
The  mind  is  continually  arrested  by  light  but  pregnant 
comments  upon  life. 

"  If  women  once  begin  to  talk  about  their  souls 
they're  done  for." 

"  Why  was  transcendent  virtue  so  much  less  charm- 
ing in  its  methods  than  mere  worldliness  ?  " 

"  Some  people  regard  love  as  a  civilised  instinct ; 
others  as  a  side-dish. 

'  Those  who  regard  it  as  a  side-dish  are  less  likely 
to  get  into  trouble,'  said  Lady  Theodosia." 

Her  second  book,  The  Sinner's  Comedy  (1892),  written 
during  a  period  of  intense  mental  strain  and  anguish, 
is  similar  in  character  to  her  first.  And  then  quickly 
followed  A  Study  in  Temptations  (1893),  A  Bundle  of 
Life  (1894)  and  The  Gods,  Some  Mortals  and  Lord  Wicken- 
ham  (1895),  all  of  which  failed  to  attain  the  popularity 
of  her  first  volume.  The  last  named  is  one  of  John  Oliver 
Hobbes'  typical  books,  a  mingling  of  fantasy,  realism, 
light  cynicism  and  serious  purpose.  In  Dr.  Warre,  the 
central  figure,  she  has  giver  'is  one  of  her  best  studies 
in  the  psychology  of  a  sensitive  and  retiring  mind.  Despite 
her  banter  and  raillery  John  Oliver  Hobbes  never  lets 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  44d 

us  doubt  her  passionate  admiration  for  fine  feeling  and 
fine  thinking.  In  The  School  for  Saints  (1897)  and  Robert 
Orange  (1902)  the  texture  is  closer,  the  flash  of  epigram 
less  studied  and  the  analysis  of  a  single  character  more 
elaborate  than  in  any  of  her  earlier  books.  Robert  Orange, 
the  hero  of  both  tales,  is  an  idealised  portrait  of  Disraeli. 
In  the  conclusion  he  deserts  politics  to  take  orders  in  the 
Church  of  Rome.  On  these  two  volumes  John  Oliver 
Hobbes  expended  much  labour,  thought  and  care,  she 
gave  more  of  herself  and  her  philosophy  of  life  than  she 
was  commonly  disposed  to  reveal ;  for  she  was  writing 
to  please  herself,  not  a  reading  public.  These  novels  are 
not  without  dramatic  moments  ;  but  the  background  is 
slight,  narrative  is  subservient  to  ideas  underlying  it, 
and  neither  is  of  the  type  designed  to  win  popularity. 
Love  and  the  Soul  Hunters  (1902)  does  not  admit  of  being 
summarised  ;  it  has  that  vagueness  and  indefiniteness 
in  the  welding  of  the  ideas  and  the  plot  which  explain 
John  Oliver  Hobbes'  failure  when  she  wrote  for  the  stage. 
In  clearness  of  narrative  and  definition  of  outline  The 
Vineyard  (1904),  a  study  of  life  in  a  country  town,  is 
sharply  contrasted  with  its  predecessor.  Her  last  book, 
The  Dream,  and  the  Business  (1906),  is  the  largest  in  out- 
line and  the  strongest  in  handling  of  any  of  her  novels. 
The  epigrammatic  and  vivacious  manner  was  gradually 
abandoned  by  Mrs.  Craigie ;  it  persists,  in  larger  or 
smaller  measure,  in  all  her  novels  up  to  the  date  of  The 
Gods,  Some  Mortals  and  Lord  Wickenham ;  after  that, 
when  it  appears,  it  is  only  as  an  occasional  ornament,  not 
as  a  continuous  embroidery  of  the  narrative.  In  The 
Dream  and  the  Business  it  has  but  a  small  part  to  play. 
The  book  consists  of  a  skilful  study  in  contrasts  between 
the  Roman  Catholic,  the  Nonconformist  and  the  Pagan 
temperaments  ;  and  the  absence  of  prejudice  is  remark- 
able in  one  who  followed  seriously  and  with  entire  faith 
the  religion  of  her  adoption. 

Mrs.  Craigie  also  nursed  ambitions  as  a  dramatist,  but 
the  faults  which  beset  her  novels  told  with  tenfold  force 
against  her  when  she  wrote  for  the  stage.  The  Ambassador 
(1898),  a  comedy  in  four  acts,  gained  some  success  by 
reason  of  its  witty  dialogue  ;  but  A  Repentance  (1899) 
and  The  Wisdom  of  the  Wise  (1900)  were  too  indistinct 


444  THE  NOVEL  [PART  TV 

in  action  and  characterisation  to  meet  with  a  favourable 
reception.  The  fantastic  Flute  of  Pan  (1904),  after  a 
successful  production  in  Manchester,  failed  in  London. 

John  Oliver  Hobbes  presented  more  than  one  side  to 
the  world.  She  described  herself  as  living  two  lives,  and 
her  dual  personality  could  be  read  in  her  novels  did  we 
not  know  it  from  other  sources.  In  that  round  of  social 
life  in  which  she  took  her  part  she  appeared  vivacious, 
gay  and  high-spirited  ;  in  the  sanctuary  of  her  mind  she 
was  never  free  from  melancholy.  It  was  her  wish  to  be 
considered  an  idealist  and  a  philosophic  novelist,  not  the 
author  of  witty  and  sparkling  tales.  But,  despite  her 
wide  knowledge  of  philosophy  and  the  wealth  of  her 
ideas,  her  mind  was  neither  clear  nor  logical,  and  in  her 
longer  novels  she  fails  to  attain  point  and  coherence. 
Her  plots  are  often  extremely  ill  handled,  and  the  lacunce 
of  her  narrative  exasperate  the  reader.  Her  strength 
lies  in  the  acuteness  of  her  biting  wit,  the  search- 
ing insight  of  many  of  her  character  studies  (though 
she  is  not  always  stable  and  consistent  in  her  delineation 
of  personality)  and  in  a  style  light  and  vivid  but  never 
shallow. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  work  of  John  Oliver  Hobbes 
is  not  to  be  paralleled  in  the  writings  of  contemporary 
authoresses.  Nevertheless  it  may  be 
Mary  E.  Coleridge,  permissible  to  name  here  one  or  two 
1861-1907.  writers  of  distinction  who  are  chiefly 

noteworthy  for  imaginative  fantasy  and 
a  fine  wit.  Mary  Coleridge  is  rightly  remembered  as  a 
poet,  but  her  prose-writing  was  not  only  far  greater  in 
volume  than  her  verse,  much  of  it  is  also  well  worthy 
of  preservation.  Non  Sequitur  (1900)  was  a  volume  of 
miscellaneous  essays  far  removed  from  the  ordinary  in 
insight,  critical  thought  and  style  ;  and  at  least  one  of 
her  prose  tales  deserves  to  be  remembered.  Her  first 
published  novel,  The  Seven  Sleepers  of  Ephesus  (1893), 
an  abnormally  fantastic  piece  of  writing,  though  it  met 
with  the  praise  of  Stevenson,  is  not  an  example. of  her 
happiest  manner.  Nor  are  her  two  lengthy  and  ambitious 
historical  romances,  The  King  with  Two  Faces  (1897)  and 
The  Fiery  Dawn  (1901)  more  than  moderately  successful 
experiments.  The  chief  figure  of  the  earlier  romance  is 


CHAP,  ivj  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  445 

Gustav  III  of  Sweden,  of  the  latter  the  Duchesse  de 
Berri,  and  we  are  introduced  to  the  Paris  of  Gautier, 
Balzac  and  Hugo.  Her  only  novel,  and  indeed  the  book 
is  scarcely  deserving  the  name,  is  The  Lady  on  the  Drawing- 
room  Floor  (1906),  which  relates,  with  droll  wit,  humour 
and  tender  pathos,  the  story  of  a  man  and  woman  who 
loved  once  and  met  again  in  a  London  lodging-house. 
Mary  Coleridge's  historical  romances  leave  us  cold  and 
uninterested,  but  this  exquisitely  witty,  true  and  gentle 
vignette  of  life  induces  a  regret  that  she  wrote  nothing 
more  of  its  kind.  She  was  not  by  nature  or  instinct  the 
novelist,  her  true  gift  lay  with  the  fantasy ;  and  as  a 
writer  of  fiction,  apart  from  The  Lady  on  the  Drawing- 
room  Floor,  she  appears  at  her  best  in  the  few  short 
stories  she  wrote,  and  of  these  the  pathetic  '  The  King 
is  dead,  long  live  the  King  '  may  be  named  as  one  of 
the  finest  examples  of  her  prose  and  her  imaginative 
power. 

Noteworthy  also  for  the  fine  quality  of  their  wit,  irony, 
satire,  terse  and  effective  style  are  the  easy  and  delightful 
minglings  of  essay,  causerie  and  fiction 
''  Elizabeth."  contained  in  the  writings  of  the  anonymous 
authoress  (Countess  von  Arnim)1  of  Elizabeth 
and  Her  German  Garden  (1898).  Her  first  book  was  followed 
by  others  equally  distinguished  for  their  grace,  light- 
handedness  and  satirical  wit — among  them  A  Solitary 
Summer  (1899),  Princess  Priscilla's  Fortnight  (1906)  and 
Elizabeth's  Adventures  in  Rugen  (1904).  In  The  Caravaners 
(1909)  the  intentional  thrust  and  directness  of  her  satire 
upon  German  life  and  manners  became  emphatically  pro- 
nounced, and  the  book  gave  not  the  less  offence  to  its 
victims  because  the  writer  was  intimately  acquainted  with 
the  inner  life  of  the  country  she  attacked. 

Ellen  Thorneycroft  Fowler  (Hon.  Mrs.  Alfred  Felkin), 

although  in  her  later  books  she  has  greatly  changed  her 

method,    first    gained    reputation    as    a 

Ellen  Thorneycroft  witty   and   epigrammatic   writer.     After 

Fowler,  b.  1860.      publishing  several  volumes  of  slight  verse 

she    won    general    popularity    with    the 

novel,  Concerning  Isabel  Carnaby  (1898),  a  book  chiefly 

remarkable,  especially  in  the  earlier  chapters,  for  clever, 

1  Now  Lady  Russell.     Married  2nd  Earl  Russell,  1916. 


446  THE  NOVEL  [PART  nr 

if  artificial,  dialogue  and  a  plethora  of  epigram.  The 
story  contrasts  the  manners  of  a  Methodist  household 
with  the  ways  of  fashionable  society,  and  involves  a  love 
episode  between  a  Methodist  tutor  and  a  woman  of  the 
world.  The  hero,  the  heroine,  a  minister's  humble  house- 
hold are  all  well  conceived  and  clearly  depicted,  and  the 
authoress's  turn  of  epigram  is  often  original  and  telling. 
An  individual  is  summed  up  in  the  witty  remark  that  his 
temper,  like  "  canal  bridges  "  was  never  equal  to  bearing 
more  than  "  the  ordinary  traffic  of  the  district  "  ;  and 
the  careless  servant  with  the  observation  that  "  she 
seemed  to  regard  herself  as  merely  the  instrument  in  a 
fore-ordained  scheme  of  destruction."  Isabel  Carnaby  is 
no  excursion  into  a  new  field,  yet  it  is  genuine  and  sincere 
work,  witty  without  triviality,  for  all  Ellen  Thorney- 
croft  Fowler's  tales  are  concerned  with  the  tragedy  of 
man's  moral  relationship  to  inexorable  circumstance.  But 
the  moral  intention  of  her  novels,  together  with  the  plot, 
is  wanting  in  originality.  She  will  adopt,  without  scruple, 
wildly  melodramatic  plots,  unconscious  of  the  injury 
she  inflicts  upon  her  characters,  who,  better  than  their 
situation,  are  forced  unwillingly  to  make  the  best  of 
matters,  scarcely  able  to  hide  the  embarrassment  they 
feel.  In  A  Double  Thread  (1899)  a  woman  of  wealth  plays 
an  incredibly  worked-out  double  rdle,  sometimes  posing 
as  a  poor  twin-sister  in  order  to  find  if  she  may  win  true 
love  ;  and  Miss  Fallow  field's  Fortune  (1908)  is  a  tissue 
of  improbabilities,  in  which  fate  juggles  skilfully  with 
life,  death,  an  unexpected  reappearance  from  the  grave 
and  a  million  of  money.  Nor  is  The  Wisdom  of  Folly 
(1910),  with  its  sensational  murder  case  and  its  unhinged 
love  affairs,  more  convincing  in  narrative.  In  these  later 
books  Ellen  Thorneycroft  Fowler  almost  entirely  abandons 
the  display  of  aphorism  and  epigram  which  gave  character 
to  her  first  novel  and  several  of  its  successors — The 
Farringdons  (1900),  Fuel  of  Fire  (1902)  and  Place  and 
Power  (1903). 

If  we  set  aside  her  interest  in  the  claim  of  religion  and 
morality  on  the  heart  Ellen  Thorneycroft  Fowler  is  not  a 
writer  of  the  day.  Peculiarly  modern  hopes,  ideals  and 
ambitions  are  not  reflected  in  her  tales  ;  and  she  is  not 
to  be  placed  with  writers  like  Miss  Sinclair,  Elizabeth 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  447 

Robins  or  Matilde  Serao.  Her  point  of  view  is  feminine, 
and  the  relationship  of  the  sexes  is  to  her  as  it  was  to 
Jane  Austen.  Her  chief  gifts  are  a  power  convincingly 
to  characterise  ordinary  and  commonplace  people  and  a 
readiness  in  the  use  of  good  epigram.  Work  that  might 
have  been  better  worthy  of  mention  has  been  weakened 
by  absence  of  originality  in  vision  and  invention,  by 
failure  in  plot-construction  and  surrender  to  melodrama. 
Other  women  novelists  whose  work  scarcely  permits 
of  definite  classification  under  any  heading  can  only  be 
named  briefly  and  after  a  loose  chrono- 
Lady  Ritchie,  logical  method.  Lady  Ritchie,  the  daughter 
1838-1919.  of  Thackeray,  followed  in  the  foot- 

steps of  her  father,  but  her  work  as  a 
novelist  antedates  our  period,  and  for  many  years 
she  wrote  hardly  any  fiction.  In  her  novels,  her 
critical  studies  and  her  edition  of  her  father's  works 
she  showed  herself  the  possessor  of  a  fine  literary  gift 
and  a  graceful  style.  In  Elizabeth  (1863),  The  Village 
on  the  Cliff  (1865),  Old  Kensington  (1873),  and  other 
books  leading  to  Mrs.  Dymond  (1885),  she  gave  evidence 
of  a  power  clearly  and  distinctively  to  portray  life  and 
character.  In  later  years  she  wrote  essays,  reminis- 
cences and  critical  studies,  and  in  1898  she  edited  with 
admirable  introductions  the  works  of  her  father. 

Mrs.  M.  L.  Woods  has  won  greater  distinction  as  a 
poetess  ;  and  in  another  chapter  it  has  been  observed 
that  if  we  are  to  judge  her  by  her 
Margaret  Louisa  poetic  drama,  Wild  Justice,  and  by 
Woods,  b.  1856.  her  novels  she  is  to  be  classed  with 
the  poetic  realists.  Tragedy  and  romance 
are  mingled  in  her  picture  of  village  life  contained 
in  A  Village  Tragedy  (1887),  and  in  The  Vagabonds 
(1894),  a  story  of  life  in  a  travelling  circus.  In 
Esther  Vanhomrigh  (1891)  Mrs.  Woods  reconstructs  the 
hidden  romance  of  Swift's  life.  These,  together  with  her 
later  books,  Sons  of  the  Sword  (1901),  The  King's  Revoke 
(1905)  and  others,  manifest  Mrs.  Woods'  simple,  strong 
and  large  outlook  upon  her  life,  her  intellectual  force 
and  her  sense  of  the  poetry  of  the  commonplace. 

Among    other  women   novelists   who    began   to   write 
in  the    earlier    half   of    the    ninth    decade    of    the    last 


448  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

century  John  Strange  Winter  (Mrs.  Henrietta  Eliza 
Vaughan  Stannard)  and  Mrs.  W.  K.  Clifford  cannot  here 
be  omitted,  although  in  neither  case 
John  Strange  Winter,  is  their  work  distinctive  or  significant. 
1856-1911.  John  Strange  Winter,  the  daughter  of 

a  Yorkshire  rector,  early  began  to 
contribute  stories  of  a  sentimental  character  to  the 
magazines.  Her  father,  before  taking  orders,  had  been 
an  officer  in  the  Royal  Artillery  and  came  of  several 
generations  of  soldiers.  It  was,  therefore,  natural  that 
the  greater  number  of  John  Strange  Winter's  tales  should 
describe  the  life  of  the  army.  After  her  marriage  in 
1884  she  settled  in  London,  and  in  1885  Bootless  Baby : 
A  Story  of  the  Scarlet  Lancers  appeared  in  the  Graphic. 
The  tale  when  published  in  volume  form  met  with  extra- 
ordinary favour  ;  and  within  ten  years  two  million  copies 
were  sold.  Other  stories,  similar  in  character,  were  then 
produced  in  rapid  succession.  The  better  known  are 
Houp-la  (1885),  On  March  (1886),  Heart  and  Sword  (1898), 
A  Blaze  of  Glory  (1902),  Marty  (1903)  and  Little  Vanities 
of  Miss  Whittaker  (1904). 

Outside  her  writing  Mrs.  Stannard  had  many  activities. 
She  took  an  interest  in  questions  relating  to  women's 
dress  and  appearance,  and  even  sold  a  toilet  preparation 
of  her  own  compounding.  She  was  the  first  president  of 
the  Writers'  Club  (1892)  and  president  of  the  Society  of 
Women  Journalists  (1901-3). 

Curiously  enough  Ruskin  was  one  of  the  most  devoted 
and  admiring  of  her  readers,  and  described  her  as  "  the 
author  to  whom  we  owe  the  most  finished  and  faithful 
rendering  ever  yet  given  of  the  character  of  the  British 
soldier."  But  Ruskin  is  not  always  a  safe  guide,  and  his 
praise  is  certainly  high-pitched.  John  Strange  Winter 
wrote  vivaciously,  with  humour  and  sympathy  ;  but  the 
secret  of  her  great  popularity  lay  in  the  pretty  sentiment 
with  which  she  touched  her  tales  ;  and  sentimentality 
is  always  a  sure  road  to  the  heart  of  the  English  public. 
Her  talent  never  rose  higher  than  that  of  the  highly 
accomplished  journalistic  story-teller. 

And,  though  one  of  her  books  is  deserving  of  greater 
praise,  pleasant  sentiment  is  the  distinguishing  charac- 
teristic of  Mrs.  W.  K.  Clifford's  novels.  She  always 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  449 

writes  sanely  and  sincerely,  she  is  helped  by  a  cultured 
knowledge  of  English  life  at  home  and  abroad ;  her 
style  is  regular  and  well-formed  ;  and 
Mrs.  W.  K.  Clifford,  she  touches  the  chord  of  tender  senti- 
ment without  undue  exaggeration.  A 
pleasant  wholesomeness  of  thought,  a  slender  theme  skil- 
fully elaborated  into  a  long  tale  are  the  marks  of  her 
work.  Mrs.  Keith's  Crime  (1885),  an  early  novel,  con- 
tains more  tragedy  than  is  her  wont ;  but  the  agonised 
delirium  of  the  mother  who  prefers  her  ailing  child  to 
die  with  her,  rather  than  be  left  to  grow  well  among 
strangers,  is  intolerably  extended,  till  the  reader  is  more 
exhausted  than  impressed.  Aunt  Anne  (1892),  by  far 
her  best  book,  is  the  character-sketch  of  a  pathetic 
figure,  a  dignified  yet  foolish  and  sentimental  old  woman 
deceived  into  marriage  by  an  adventurer  who  hopes  only 
for  her  money.  The  book  is  a  remarkably  fine  study  and 
a  strong  piece  of  writing  ;  the  foolish,  tiresome,  extra- 
vagant old  woman  remains  in  our  imagination  and  elicits 
our  pity  as  strongly  as  the  figure  of  Pere  Goriot.  A 
Woman  Alone  (1901),  The  Modern  Way  (1907)  and 
Mrs.  Clifford's  other  tales,  whether  novels  or  short  stories, 
are  distinctly  secondary  to  Aunt  Anne.  Sir  George's 
Objection  (1910)  may  be  taken  as  a  pattern  of  the  type. 
A  charming  girl's  marriage  prospects  are  clouded  by  a 
stain  on  her  father's  memory,  but  the  situation  clears  in 
sunshine  and  happy  tears.  Such  is  the  texture  of  the 
story  ;  and  of  the  like  simple  material  her  other  books 
are  made. 

Mrs.  Alfred  Sidgwick  is  also  the  authoress  of  a  number 

of  pleasant  and  skilfully  written  tales,  chiefly  negative 

in  character.     They  are  not  realistically 

Mrs.  Alfred  Sidg-    burdened  with  questions  of  the  day,  nor 

wick.  do  they  belong  to  the  class  that  is  wholly 

tame.   The  Inner  Shrine  (1900),  Cynthia's 

Way  (1901),  Anthea's  Guest  (1911)  and  Below  Stairs  (1913) 

are    typical   of  her   manner ;    they  provoke   no   thought 

or  unrest,  and  they  are  written  in  an  easy  and  excellent 

style. 

Miss  Netta  Syrett  has  also  a  pen  that  moves  readily. 
She  can  write  fairy-tales  or  edit  gracefully  for  children 
without  losing  her  power  to  construct  books  of  a  more 
2  a 


450  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

ambitious  character.     She  delights  to  take  for  her  plot- 
idea  the  eccentric  or  the  child  of  genius  faced  with  the 

unexpectedness  of  life.  Rosanne  (1902) 
Netta  Syrett.  and  Barbara  of  the  Thorn  (1913)  were 

written  upon  this  motive ;  but  far  better, 
and  indeed  much  the  strongest  of  her  novels,  is  The  Child 
of  Promise  (1907),  a  tale  distinguished  by  intellectual 
power,  true  feeling  and  vigorous  humour. 

Miss  Una  L.  Silberrad  has  less  gift  as  a  stylist  and  her 
method  is  sometimes  crude,   but  she  is  observant,   her 

characters  live  and  her  tales  are  marked 
Una  L.  Silberrad,  by  a  kind  of  conscious  energy.  The  Good 
b.  1872.  Comrade  (1907)  is  perhaps  the  best  of  her 

books,  and  of  the  others  The  Wedding  of 
the  Lady  of  Lovel  (1905)  and  Simon  Rideout,  Quaker  (1911) 
may  be  named. 

Among  the  latest  to  appear  in  the  field  of  feminine 
fiction  Miss   Ethel   Sidgwick  is   specially  to  be   named. 

Promise  (1910),  an  intricate  study  in 
Ethel  Sidgwick.  the  mind  of  a  child  and  youth  of  genius 
b.  1877.  was  a  remarkable  first  novel.  If  the 

character  and  story  of  the  hero  inevit- 
ably recalled  M.  Holland's  Jean-Chrisophe,  the  method 
of  Miss  Sidgwick  was  not  that  of  the  French  writer,  for 
she  is  without  his  sense  of  form,  his  wonderful  sequence 
of  movement  in  the  study  of  a  mind  and  his  perfect 
clarity.  Le  Gentleman  (1911)  and  Herself  (1912)  were 
also  thoughtful  novels,  graced  with  charm,  humour  and 
unobtrusive  satire  ;  but  it  was  not  till  Miss  Sidgwick 
continued  the  story  of  Antoine  Edgell  in  Succession  (1913), 
the  sequel  to  Promise,  that  she  rivalled  her  first  book. 
In  this  she  adopted,  as  in  all  her  previous  tales,  a  setting 
half  French,  half  English,  and  in  a  novel  of  more  than 
average  length  she  sustained  unfalteringly  an  elaborate 
if  somewhat  distant  and  detached  study  of  genius  in 
conflict  with  the  hard  knocks  of  the  world.  In  all  her 
books  she  has  shown  a  power  of  carrying  forward  the 
development  of  plot  as  much  in  the  dialogue  as  in  direct 
narrative.  They  are  intellectually  rather  than  imagina- 
tively shaped,  for,  though  her  tales  are  not  without  pathos 
and  sudden  fire,  she  writes  largely  with  the  mind.  Perhaps 
the  failure  of  the  finer  feminine  novel  to  reach  the  standard 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  451 

of  the  greater  novel  written  by  man  lies  in  an  overplus 
of  self-conscious  intellectuality.  George  Eliot's  failure  as 
an  artist  is  that  she  was  too  much  the  thinker  ;  Jane 
Austen,  on  the  other  hand,  the  greatest  novelist  among 
Englishwomen,  and  Christina  Rossetti,  the  greatest 
poetess,  had  no  aggressive  intellectuality. 

The  novel  written  by  women  in  Ireland  is  not  more 
characteristic  than  the  novel  written  by  men  in  the  same 

country.  Save  in  the  matter  of  a  super- 
Jane  Barlow,  imposed  local  colour  it  has  no  marks  that 
b.  1860.  are  peculiarly  its  own.  It  has  not  yet 

thrown  in  its  part  and  lot  with  the  Celtic 
Revival,  and  it  is  now  probably  too  late  to  begin.  Miss 
Jane  Barlow's  tales  of  peasant  folk  and  gentry  belong  to 
Connemara.  Kerrigan's  Quality  (1894)  and  Flaws  (1911), 
rambling  and  loose  novels  of  country  life,  serve  to  con- 
vince us  that  her  true  gift  lies  with  the  short  story. 
Irish  Idylls  (1892),  A  Creel  of  Irish  Stories  (1897)  and 
From  the  Land  of  the  Shamrock  (1901)  are  simple  tales, 
wTitten  in  a  fine  style  and  in  a  spirit  of  humour  tinged 
with  irony.  Within  the  limits  set  these  stories  are  admir- 
able in  their  simple  humanity  and  only  injured  by  an 
unnecessarily  laboured  rendering  of  dialect. 

Katharine    Tynan    (Mrs.    Hinkson)   has   written   much 
pretty  and  sentimental  verse,  and  her  prose  is  likewise 

dreamy,  poetical,  graceful  and  senti- 
Katharine  Tynan,  mental  by  turns,  but  wanting  in  any 
b.  1861.  suggestion  of  personality.  She  rarely 

fails  to  introduce  a  breath  of  poetry 
and  quiet  grace  into  her  narrative,  and  as  rarely  has  she 
any  dramatic  force  or  intensity.  The  early  volume  of 
short  tales,  A  Cluster  of  Nuts  (1894),  has  been  followed 
by  a  continuous  stream  of  novels  and  volumes  of  short 
stories,  among  w^hich  may  be  named  more  particularly 
The  Handsome  Brandons  (1893),  A  Daughter  of  the  Fields 
(1900),  The  Story  of  Clarice  (1911)  and  Honey,  my  Honey 
(1912).  The  greater  number  of  these  tales  and  sketches 
of  Irish  life  turn  upon  pleasant  and  agreeable  themes — 
a  girl  sacrificed  to  the  drudgery  of  farm  labour  finds  a 
lover  and  a  husband,  the  broken  love  affairs  of  two  Irish 
girls  of  good  family  and  their  happy  marriage  in  the  close 
of  events,  these  and  other  themes  of  a  like  nature  Katharine 


452  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

Tynan  touches  with  wholesome  sentiment.  Her  matter 
is  never  very  full,  she  rings  her  changes  upon  a  small 
scale  of  topics  ;  but  she  has,  at  least,  an  attractive  style 
and  a  gift  of  lending  a  gentle  vein  of  poetry  to  her 
narrative. 

If  Nora  Hopper  (Mrs.  Wilfrid  Hugh  Chesson)  be  placed 
here  it  can  only  be  by  an  arbitrary  arrangement  and 
because  in  another  chapter  she  must  be 
Nora  Hopper,       named  with  the  Irish  poetesses.     Her  two 
1871-1906.  novels,  The  Bell  and  the  Arrow  (1905)  and 

Father  Felix's  Chronicles,  published  post- 
humously in  1907,  in  no  way  indicate  the  Irish  origin 
of  the  authoress.  The  first  is  a  love  tale  with  a  setting 
among  the  country  gentry  of  Devonshire.  It  has  the 
same  prettiness  as  marks  her  verse,  the  same  sense  of 
pathos  and  undeveloped  consciousness  of  the  tragic.  One 
character  alone  is  not  easily  forgotten,  that  of  Miss 
Dolores  Tregennis,  the  simple-minded  old  maid  who  walks 
her  way  through  life  clouded  by  the  tender  and  pretty 
melancholy  of  an  early  disappointment  in  love.  Father 
Felix's  Chronicles,  a  book  written  many  years  before  pub- 
lication, is  an  attempt  to  depict  life  in  mediaeval  England 
in  the  words  of  a  Benedictine  monk.  It  can  scarcely  be 
regarded  as  a  signal  success  in  a  difficult  form  of  art. 

Beside  these  the  work  of  two  cousins,  Miss  Edith  CEnone 

Somerville  and  Miss  Violet  Martin,1  who  write  under  the 

pen-name  of  E.  (E.  Somerville  and  Martin 

E.  (E.  Somerville   Ross,   may   be   briefly  mentioned.     They 

and  have  written  a  number  of  sporting  tales 

Martin  Ross.         and  humorous  sketches  of  Irish  life — Some 

Experiences  of  an  Irish  R.M.  (1899),  Further 

Experiences  of  an  Irish  R.M.  (1903)  and  All  on  the  Irish 

Shore  (1903)  are  among  their  collected  volumes — which  are 

commendably  written  and  vigorous  if  a  little  tiresome  and 

laboured  in  humour.     The  spirit  of  these  tales  and  their 

simple  devices  are  as  old  as  Lover. 

The  number  of  successful  women  novelists,  those  who 
by  fiction  can  earn  a  large  or  modest  competence,  has 
perhaps  already  outstripped  the  number  of  men  engaged 
in  the  same  struggle.  And  in  either  case  the  quantity  of 
good,  but  not  distinctive  or  personal  work  produced  is 
1  Miss  Violet  Martin  died  1915. 


CHAP,  iv]  WOMEN  NOVELISTS  458 

remarkable.  No  purpose  could  be  served  in  the  attempt 
to  survey  a  field  so  large  ;  but  three  women  writers  who 
have  for  many  years  retained  an  astonishing  popularity 
may  be  named  before  this  chapter  is  brought  to  a  close. 

Louise  de  la  Ramee,  who  used  the  pseudonym  Ouida, 
was  born  at  Bury  St.  Edmunds,  but  spent  the  greater 
part  of  her  later  life  at  Florence.  Her 
Ouida,  first  story,  printed  when  she  was  only 

1840-1908.  twenty,  appeared  in  a  magazine;  and 

from  girlhood  throughout  life  she  continued 
to  be  a  busy  and  energetic  worker,  although  the  years 
brought  neither  wisdom  nor  knowledge.  Among  her  books 
may  be  mentioned  Strathmore  (1865),  Under  Two  Flags 
(1867),  Moths  (1880)  and  Princess  Napraxine  (1884).  All 
her  tales  are  conducted  with  pace  and  energy,  they  are 
the  work  of  a  woman  who  was  herself  living  to  the  full 
from  day  to  day  ;  but  they  are  a  glaring  patchwork  of 
faults  in  taste  and  style,  and  none  has  a  vestige  of 
literary  merit.  For  many  readers  her  appalling  ignorance 
of  even  the  commonest  concerns  of  daily  life  and  her 
amazing  blunders  formed  the  chief  attraction  of  her  wrork, 
while  others  accepted  her  glitter,  tinsel  and  gaudy  effects 
as  a  true  picture  of  that  unknown  world  where  the  aristo- 
cratic and  wealthy  misbehave. 

Mary  Elizabeth  Braddon  (Mrs.  John  Maxwell)  was  less 
gaudy  and  sensational,  but  hardly  less  melodramatic.  A 
comedietta  which  was  performed  in  1860, 
Mary  Elizabeth  poems  and  one  or  two  early  novels  had 
Braddon,  little  success.  In  1862,  however,  Lady 

1837-1915.  Audley's  Secret,  a  thrilling  murder  story, 

ran  through  three  editions  in  three  months, 
and  since  the  year  of  its  appearance  it  has  been  con- 
tinually reprinted.  None  of  her  succeeding  books  has 
been  so  immediately  popular,  but  she  never  lost  her  hold 
upon  a  class  of  reader  and  almost  each  year  of  her  life 
printed  a  new  novel.  Among  the  best  are  Henry  Dunbar 
(1864),  Ishmael  (1884),  The  Infidel  (1900)  and  The  Rose 
of  Life  (1905),  which  are  typical  of  the  work  of  the  accom- 
plished writer  for  the  railway  bookstall. 

Miss  Marie  Corelli  takes  herself  more  seriously,  and  in 
one  or  two  books  she  has  produced  work  of  a  better  order 
than  the  last-named  two  writers.  She  has  reached 


454  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

beyond  to  that  section  of  readers  who  enjoy  in  fiction 
religious  topics  touched  with  an  air  of  novelty  that  is  not 
too  dangerous,  thus  pandering  to  their 
Maxie  Corelli,  petty   dissatisfactions    with    the    vicar, 

b.  1864.  the    local  minister  or   the  wicked   lives 

of  the  idle  rich.  And  if  style,  character- 
drawing  from  observation  and  experience,  knowledge  and 
thought,  as  distinguished  from  prejudice  and  emotion- 
alism, are  matters  of  no  moment,  the  overwhelmingly 
serious  prose-moralities  of  Miss  Corelli  must  doubtless 
seem  impressive  documents.  Her  first  book,  A  Romance 
of  Two  Worlds  (1886),  brought  her  the  popularity  she 
has  easily  sustained.  Novel  after  novel  has  been  pub- 
lished in  an  enormous  first  edition  and  followed  by  a 
continuous  stream  of  reprints.  If  Miss  Corelli  is  a  prophet 
she  is  not  without  honour  in  her  own  country,  for  her 
most  successful  books  have  been  noisy  indictments  of 
contemporary  religion  or  morality.  The  Mighty  Atom 
(1896)  reveals  the  folly  of  educating  children  without 
religion,  lest  they  should  hang  themselves  to  discover 
whether  a  dead  friend  has  gone  to  heaven.  Wormwood 
(1890)  paints  in  lurid  colours,  to  a  race  which  is  in  no 
danger  of  adopting  the  habit,  the  horrors  of  absinthe 
drinking.  The  Master  Christian  (1900)  calls  the  churches 
to  judgment  and  finds  them  wanting  ;  and  God's  Good 
Man  (1904)  shows  the  clergyman  as  he  ought  to  be. 

If  in  imaginative  and  literary  quality  there  be  any- 
thing to  choose  between  Miss  Corelli' s  novels,  perhaps 
Temporal  Power  (1902)  may  be  regarded  as  the  best  in 
her  work.  Her  melodramatic  moral  tales,  though  pre- 
posterous in  matter,  have  probably  worked  no  harm  in 
themselves  ;  they  may  certainly  have  done  something 
to  lower  the  standard  of  taste  for  readers  who  were 
unab  e  to  recognise  under  a  parade  of  novelty  a  com- 
plete absence  of  originality,  grotesque  travesty  of  social 
life,  and  a  slipshod  style  full  of  inaccuracies  and  gross 
solecisms. 


CHAPTER  V 

A   NOTE    ON   AMERICAN   NOVELISTS 

Henry  James — W.  D.  Howells — F.  Marion  Crawford — G.  W.  Cable — 
James  Lane  Allen  —  Harold  Frederic — Mary  Eleanor  Wilkins  — 
'  Charles  Egbert  Craddock  ' — Tbomas  Nelson  Page— Ellen  Glas- 
gow —  Owen  Wister  —  Frank  Norris  —  Upton  Sinclair  —  Winston 
Churchill — Robert  Herrick — Ambrose  Bierce — Jack  London — Mrs. 
Atherton — Kate  Douglas  Wiggin — Mrs.  Wharton. 

SINCE  the  great  Civil  War,  which  marked  the  beginning 
of  a  new  and  more  national  phase  in  American  literature, 
the  divergence  between  the  fiction  of  the  United  States 
and  that  of  the  Older  World  has  become  more  pronounced. 
It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  a  great  proportion  of  the 
better-read  people  of  this  country  will  find  themselves 
more  at  home  in  a  novel  by  Tolstoy,  Matilde  Serao,  Andre 
Gide  or  Anatole  France  than  they  will  in  a  tale  of  American 
life  by  Mr.  W.  D.  Howells,  Mr.  G.  W.  Cable  or  Frank 
Norris.  Paris,  rather  than  London  or  New  York,  is  the 
meeting-place  of  people  of  English  descent  from  either 
side  of  the  Atlantic.  If  American  literature  in  the  first 
place,  as  was  inevitable,  imitated  the  English  pattern, 
within  the  last  twenty  or  thirty  years  Russian  realism, 
German  awkwardness,  French  logic  and  constructive 
instinct  have  counted  for  more  and  more.  Thackeray 
and  Dickens  have  not  been  forgotten,  but  Maupassant, 
Zola,  Tolstoy  have  been  more  powerful  influences  in 
shaping  the  writing  of  some  American  novelists  of  the 
older  and  many  of  the  younger  generation.  Nevertheless 
the  last  accusation  which  can  be  brought  against  American 
fiction  in  its  latest  versions  is  that  it  is  purely  derivative  ; 
for,  like  Walt  Whitman,  the  novelists  of  the  United  States 
have  awakened  to  a  racial  and  territorial  consciousness. 
A  few  have  been  led  away  by  the  delusion,  from  which 
they  would  have  been  saved  by  the  smallest  knowledge 
of  the  history  of  literature  in  the  past,  that  the  practice 
of  letters  should  aim  at  an  indifferent  cosmopolitanism. 

455 


456  THE  NOVEL  [PAR*  IV 

Nothing  has  been  gained  and  much  has  been  lost  by  those 
who  have  attempted  to  practise  the  art  of  fiction  under 
the  guidance  of  this  mistaken  theory.  Marion  Crawford 
and  Henry  James  may  have  written  better  in  de- 
scribing the  life  of  the  Older  World  than  when  they  put 
their  hand  to  the  painting  of  American  manners,  but 
this  is  only  because  they  both  lost  touch  with  their  country 
after  a  lifetime  spent  outside  its  borders.  Neither  writer 
is  in  any  strict  sense  American.  On  the  other  hand  it  is 
America,  both  in  its  limitations  and  its  spaciousness, 
which  has  fostered  and  nourished  the  work  of  the  most 
notable  among  novelists  of  the  United  States  from  Mr. 
Ho  wells  to  Frank  Norris  and  Mr.  Winston  Churchill.  Mr. 
Howells,  despite  his  travels  and  his  many  years  of  life  in 
Europe,  remains  a  typical  American. 

American  literature,  apart  from  an  immense  outpouring 
of  Calvinistic  and  theological  writings,  begins  with  the 
nineteenth  century,  with  the  beginning  of  a  national  life 
and  a  consciousness  of  unity  in  the  States.  And  for  many 
years  thereafter  it  contented  itself,  more  markedly  than 
the  literature  of  the  mother  country,  with  variations  upon 
standard  themes  and  exercises.  American  fiction  was  born 
with  the  early  tales  and  novels  of  Washington  Irving  and 
James  Fenimore  Cooper  ;  and  these  are  now  scarcely  a 
century  old.  In  Irving  the  debt  to  Addison  and  Gold- 
smith is  not  concealed,  and  the  imaginative  romances  of 
Cooper  owe  much  to  Scott.  Almost  a  quarter  of  a  century 
later  is  to  be  placed  the  work  of  two  far  greater  and  more 
original  writers  of  fiction,  Hawthorne  and  Poe.  The  latter 
owed  little  to  America  ;  he  satirised  its  democratic  com- 
placency, he  had  neither  part  nor  lot  with  the  then  pre- 
dominant New  England  transcendentalism.  The  genius 
of  Hawthorne  was  more  typically  an  outcome  of  the  age 
and  the  country  ;  and  perhaps  few  will  contest  the  state- 
ment that  The  Scarlet  Letter  is  the  greatest,  the  most 
individual  in  character  of  all  American  novels.  It  appeared 
in  1850,  the  year  following  Poe's  death,  and  falling  thus 
midway  in  the  century  it  marks  a  neutral  period,  which 
passed,  after  the  Civil  War,  into  another  more  pronouncedly 
national,  in  which  the  American  writer  became  conscious 
of  the  immense  size  of  his  country,  of  its  many  physical 
and  racial  interests,  characteristics  and  peculiarities.  The 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  457 

novel  definitely  invested  with  a  local  atmosphere,  New  Eng- 
land, Virginian,  Middle  West,  Californian  or  Southern,  has 
overshadowed  the  older  and  less  localised  type  of  narrative. 

Many  writers  of  the  localised  or  dialect  tale  and  novel 
have  been  content  to  represent  realistically  or  romantically 
the  life  of  a  state  or  district — Mr.  Cable  and  Mrs.  Freeman 
are  pertinent  examples  of  writers  whose  aim  goes  no 
further.  But  younger  writers  have  been  fascinated  by 
the  immense  size  and  teeming  life  of  the  States,  and 
narrative  with  an  environment  set  in  Chicago,  Philadelphia 
or  California  has  been  violently  forced  to  its  highest  power, 
till  an  episode  or  conjunction  of  circumstances  is  treated 
as  symbolically  significant  of  the  whole  life  of  the  country 
or  certain  aspects  of  it.  The  suggestion  or  inspiration  to 
attempt  this  type  of  novel  comes,  it  is  needless  to  say, 
from  Zola.  Typical  American  novels  built  upon  this 
formula  are  Frank  Norris's  Octopus,  Mr.  Upton  Sinclair's 
Jungle  and  Mrs.  Atherton's  Ancestors.  In  no  case  is  the 
attempt  altogether  successful :  what  is  true  of  Zola  is 
true  of  these  and  other  American  writers — the  novel  is 
successful  despite  the  incubus  of  a  big  abstract  idea, 
because  the  author  can  forget  it  and  show  us  living  men 
and  women  fighting  with  the  circumstances  of  their 
individual  lives.  Although  the  "  big  idea  "  has  become 
an  obsession  for  many  among  younger  American  novelists, 
in  itself  it  is  of  no  account  in  any  attempt  to  judge  the 
intrinsic  value  of  their  work,  which  rests  upon  something 
else,  just  as  the  novels  of  Tolstoy,  Dostoievsky  and  Zola 
will  endure  for  other  reasons  than  the  heavily-emphasised 
social  or  philosophic  conceptions  upon  which  they  are 
sometimes  built. 

Contemporaneously  with  attempts  to  write  the  big  and 
symbolic  novel  we  find  the  United  States  becoming  more 
and  more  the  land  of  the  short  story,  for  which  the 
immediate  return  is  often  good  and  the  demand  of  the 
numberless  magazines  is  great.  The  short  story  has, 
perhaps,  always  been  the  most  popular  form  of  fiction 
in  America,  as  witness  the  tales  of  Washington  Irving 
Bret  Harte  and  Poe.  And  if,  with  the  exception  of  Poe, 
the  standard  has  never  been  as  high  as  the  best  contem- 
poraneous writing  of  Russia,  France  and  England,  the 
United  States  has  latterly  produced  many  exceptionally 


458  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

fine  writers  of  the  short  story.  It  is  only  necessary  to 
name  Mr.  Ambrose  Bierce,  '  O.  Henry,'  Jack  London  and 
Miss  Murfree. 

It  seemed  better  in  preceding  chapters  to  include  with 
the  English  one  or  two  writers  by  nationality  American. 
Henry  Harland,  for  example,  cannot  easily  be  dissociated 
from  the  Yellow  Book  and  a  well-defined  group  of  English 
writers  ;  and  one  or  two  women  writers,  by  birth  American, 
have  been  included  with  the  authoresses  of  this  country, 
because  they  have  been  largely  denationalised  and  write 
almost  entirely  under  the  influence  of  English  or  European 
ideals  and  habits  of  thought.  As  much,  at  least,  is  true 
of  Henry  James,  who,  if  he  cannot  be  said  to  have  lost 
touch  with  the  land  of  his  birth,  certainly  finds  a  more 
fruitful  region  for  study,  in  his  own  peculiar  method  of 
psychological  analysis,  in  the  complex,  traditional  and 
leisured  life  of  an  older  society.  And  his  influence  upon 
English  novelists  has  probably  been  greater  than  any  he 
has  exercised  upon  American  writers.  It  would,  there- 
fore, have  been  natural  to  include  him  in  one  of  the  pre- 
ceding chapters,  had  this  not  involved  too  gross  an  example 
of  kidnapping,  and,  at  the  same  time,  obscured  the  fact 
that  in  certain  traits  he  still  remains  definitely  an  American.1 
His  influence  has  been  so  great,  his  name  stands  for  so 
much,  especially  in  those  years  properly  within  the  purview 
of  this  book,  that  no  apology  is  needed  for  writing  more  fully 
of  Henry  James  than  of  other  American  writers  in  a  chapter 
which  only  professes  to  be  a  note  and  a  brief  summary. 

A  literary  gift  and  a  psychological  habit  of  mind 
would  appear  to  be  hereditary  in  the  family  of  Henry 

James.  His  father  was  a  well-known 
Henry  James,  American  theologian,  his  elder  brother 

1843-1916.  the  eminent  psychologist  and  pragmatic 

philosopher,  William  James.  He  received 
a  varied  education  in  New  York,  in  England  and  France, 
and  in  1862  he  was  studying  law  at  Harvard.  But  the 
law  was  soon  abandoned  for  literature.  He  began  by 
writing  short  stories  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  and  other 
periodicals  ;  and  between  1871  and  the  year  of  his  death 

1  Shortly  after  the  outbreak  of  war,  1914,  Henry  James,  in  order 
to  show  his  sympathy  witli  the  cause  of  the  Entente,  took  out  papers  of 
naturalization  as  a  British  subject. 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  459 

he  published  between  forty  and  fifty  volumes  of  essays, 
biography,  criticism  and  fiction. 

Henry  James's  early  tales  contain  the  promise  of  his  later 
novels,  but  they  do  not  obviously  exhibit  the  peculiar 
characteristics  which  the  average  reader  associates  with 
his  work.  They  are  distinguished  by  the  gracefulness  of 
their  style,  by  simplicity  of  construction  and  coherence 
of  plot.  The  movement  of  the  narrative  is  never  swift, 
yet  it  neither  flags  nor  hesitates.  The  meeting  of  people 
of  the  New  World  with  the  complicated  social  barriers 
of  the  old  is  a  common  basis  for  many  of  these  early 
tales.  It  appears  in  Roderick  Hudson  (1875)  and  its 
sequel,  The  Princess  Casamassima  (1886),  in  The  American 
(1877),  Daisy  Miller  (1878),  An  International  Episode 
(1879)  and  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  (1881).  In  these  books 
and  in  that  clear  and  perfect  piece  of  art,  The  Aspern 
Papers  (1888),  the  style  is  simple,  contrasts  of  character 
are  directly  presented,  and  there  is  little  suggestion  of 
the  prolix  elaboration  which  belongs  to  his  later  novels. 
The  early  work  betrays  a  writer  pre-eminently  subtle 
and  psychological;  but  the  extreme  complexity  of  the 
later  books  is  scarcely  indicated.  The  Aspern  Papers 
and  The  Finer  Grain  (1910)  might  well  be  by  two  different 
writers.  The  Bostonians  (1886),  a  novel  of  the  middle 
period,  is  transitional  in  its  characteristics ;  the  pro- 
lixity of  the  later  work  begins  to  appear  in  this  long 
novel  of  Boston  society,  its  ideals,  its  loves  and  its  grey 
Puritanism.  •  The  Tragic  Muse  (1890)  also  belongs  to  the 
time  of  transition  during  which  Henry  James  was  evolving 
that  complete  and  rounded  form  of  fiction  wrhich  had  been 
his  aim  and  ideal  from  the  early  years,  when  he  wrote  simple 
and  intellectually  distinctive  stories  under  the  influence  of 
Turgenieff,  Flaubert  and  Balzac,  "the  master  of  us  all." 

He  began  his  third  period  with  What  Maisie  Knew 
(1897),  an  exquisite  picture  of  the  awakening  of  moral 
sense  in  a  child  brought  up  in  an  ill-regulated  atmo- 
sphere of  contact  with  men  and  women  of  a  world 
where  the  ethical  standard  is  low.  In  this  novel  he  ful- 
filled the  aim,  pertinaciously  pursued  through  years,  of 
reaching  further  than  Balzac  in  the  creation  of  the  novel 
of  atmosphere.  It  was  not  enough  for  Henry  James 
to  recreate  the  moral  and  social  atmosphere  surrounding 


460  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

his  characters,  he  wished  to  place  them  in  a  circum- 
ambient fluid  of  the  total  consciousness  of  all  the  persons 
of  a  tale.  It  was  thus  necessary  that  each  novel  should 
be  imagined  as  a  whole,  rounded  and  complete,  the  content 
and  form  inseparable,  and  fiction  given,  as  Mr.  Morton 
Fullerton  has  well  expressed  it,  the  character  of  a  plastic 
art.  "  The  architect,  the  painter,  the  sculptor,  the  actor, 
the  servants  of  all  but  the  two  muses  of  music  and  litera- 
ture, have  at  their  disposal  signs  and  materials  which 
make  plasticity  an  essential  result.  To  arrive  at  the  same 
result  in  prose  literature  is  the  mark  of  the  highest  art. 
Mr.  James  has  achieved  it  in  his  later  books,  from  The 
Ambassadors  to  The  Golden  Bowl,  and  it  is  this  achieve- 
ment which  makes  them,  in  spite  of  the  more  accessible 
charm  of  his  earlier  novels,  the  significant  and  original 
part  of  his  work."1  Whether  Henry  James's  performance 
was  commensurate  with  his  intention  is  a  question  that  may 
be  waived  for  the  moment.  Mr.  Fullerton  well  expresses 
the  aim ;  and  he  is  justified  in  asserting  that  the 
later  novels  are  "  the  significant  and  original  part  of  his 
work,"  for  in  these,  both  in  style  and  method,  everything 
has  been  changed,  and,  though  imitators  may  be  discovered, 
a  parallel  to  Henry  James  in  prose  fiction  is  not  to  be  found. 
From  the  simple  form  of  narrative,  which  is  a  chronicle 
in  the  third  person  by  a  spectator  ab  extra,  he  has  moved 
forward,  with  clear  purpose  and  knowledge  of  his  powers, 
to  narrative  which  is  a  record  within  the  consciousness 
of  one  or  more  actors  in  the  same  drama ;  and  by  this 
method  he  hoped  not  only  to  frame  his  figures  but  to  set 
them  within  life  and  make  us  feel  the  intensity  of  life. 
For  with  all  artists,  great  or  little,  Henry  James  was  in 
love  with  life  as  he  understood  it ;  and  he  loved  London, 
the  capital  city  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race,  because  it  is 
"  the  particular  spot  in  the  world  which  communicates 
the  greatest  sense  of  life."  That  life,  in  his  sense  of  the 
word,  is  a  small  and  narrow  country  many  will  be  dis- 
posed to  assert ;  for  the  world  of  men  and  women 
untouched  by  the  conventionalities  of  a  hyper-civilisa- 
tion lay  outside  his  interest  and  attention.  Life  for 
him  was  the  intercourse  of  sophisticated  beings  in  those 
gracious,  leisurely  and  ample  surroundings  which  are  the 

1  Quarterly  Review,  April,  1910. 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  461 

heritage  of  centuries  of  culture,  art  and  wealth.  There 
are  indeed  hints  of  another  world  discernible  in  his  novels, 
but  they  are  no  more  than  meaningless  sounds  from  the 
pit  where  the  groundlings  are  herded.  A  minute  fraction 
of  the  human  race  has  first-hand  knowledge  of  the  social 
plane  which  the  novels  of  Henry  James  describe.  If,  how- 
over,  his  range  is  narrow,  it  is  adequate  within  its  sphere, 
and  no  more  can  be  asked  of  any  man.  Mr.  Hardy's 
range  is  equally  narrow,  but  it  is  nearer  to  the  substance 
and  stuff  of  life  so  carefully  wrapped  away  in  the  con- 
ventionalised beings  of  Henry  James's  novels.  Mr.  Hardy 
in  his  narrowness  is  far  more  significant  than  Henry  James, 
for  he  pierces  to  what  man  is  in  the  last  issue,  while 
the  latter  shows  man  as  he  has  made  or  is  trying  to 
remake  himself.  But  neither  of  these  has  the  range 
of  Balzac,  Tolstoy  and  Thackeray,  who  can  speak  of 
all  things  from  the  gross  mind  of  the  scullion  and  the 
peasant  to  the  megrims  of  the  intellectual  and  the  prayers 
of  the  mystic. 

Henry  James  ranges  across  the  surface  veneer  modern 
civilisation  has  painted  in  thick  coatings  upon  the  natural 
man,  and  marks  its  pattern,  noting  occasionally  a  few 
cracks  and  inequalities,  but  he  carefully  refrains  from 
scraping  away  the  lacquer  to  examine  the  nature  of  the 
substance  upon  which  it  is  painted.  It  may  be  answered 
that  it  is  of  little  moment  whether  a  beautifully  lacquered 
box  is  of  wood  or  metal,  the  significance  of  the  box  is 
the  art  of  the  painter.  And  it  can  be  admitted  that  if 
boxes  be  only  art  specimens  for  a  museum  the  answer 
suffices.  But  for  many  the  original  use  of  boxes  for  the 
storing  of  food  or  belongings  cannot  be  forgotten.  And 
life  as  we  see  it  in  Henry  James's  novels  has  too  much  the 
air  of  a  museum  of  art  exhibits,  where  all  is  expensive, 
ordered,  hushed,  set  apart  from  the  common  ways  of 
the  street,  where  the  greater  world  that  sins  and  suffers 
presses  on  past  the  doors  making  the  art  of  the  future 
for  another  generation  of  connoisseurs  and  virtuosi  to 
inspect  beneath  glass  frames.  The  personalities  of  Henry 
James's  novels  are  a  finished  and  sterile  product  of  life 
rather  than  life  in  the  being.  And  it  follows  that  his 
psychology  is  superficial.  It  is  commonly  believed,  on 
the  contrary,  that  no  writer  has  probed  so  deeply  into 


462  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

the  secrets  of  the  human  soul.  The  reverse  of  this  belief 
seems  to  be  nearer  the  truth.  "  In  Mr.  James's  work," 
says  Mr.  Scott- James,  "  we  feel  too  often  that  the  people 
are  extensive ;  seldom  that  they  are  intensive.  They 
may  have  been  analysed  to  the  last  degree  ;  so  that  we 
come  to  know  more  about  them,  but  we  do  not  always 
see  deeply  into  them."1 

The  evolution  of  Henry  James's  work  into  the  charac- 
teristics of  the  third  period  is  the  outcome  of  definite  and 
long-considered  theory  upon  the  nature  of  the  art  of 
fiction.  As  early  as  1866,  as  an  article  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  shows,  he  had  begun  seriously  to  consider  the 
aims  and  difficulties  of  the  novelist.  With  unwearying 
intellectual  enthusiasm  and  with  high  faith  in  himself 
he  continued  to  work  upon  his  theories  and  toward  his 
ideals,  until  he  slowly  evolved  the  novel  in  which  narrative 
and  character  are  reflected  within  the  consciousness  of 
the  persons  of  the  tale.  The  more  important  novels  and 
volumes  of  short  stories  belonging  to  this  period  of  Henry 
James's  writing  are  What  Maisie  Knew,  The  Awkward 
Age  (1899),  The  Wings  of  the  Dove  (1902),  The  Ambas- 
sadors (1903),  The  Golden  Bowl  (1904),  The  Finer  Grain 
(1910)  and  The  Outcry  (1911).  In  these  the  general  theme 
of  the  earlier  novels,  the  clash  of  the  new  world  with 
the  old,  is  abandoned  and  replaced  by  complex  studies 
of  ethical  and  social  reactions  against  the  prim  and 
sentimental  spirit  of  the  Victorian  age.  Nor  is  the  moral 
absent ;  in  Henry  James's  belief  the  moral  is  an  important 
element  of  fiction  ;  the  moral,  that  is,  in  a  broader  con- 
notation, for  to  dispute  the  moral  and  immoral  is  to 
reduce  art  to  the  inane.  The  moral  sense  of  a  work  of 
art  depends  "  on  the  amount  of  felt  life  concerned  in 
producing  it."  These  novels  are  not  merely  ethical  and 
social  studies  ;  they  are  reflections  of  a  sum-total  of  atmo- 
sphere and  an  attempt  to  seize  points  of  view. 

The  results  of  Henry  James's  work  are  explained  by  the 
method  of  his  approach.  With  many  writers  the  first 
consideration  is  a  plot.  Henry  James  followed  the  method 
of  Turgenieff  and  began  with  a  personality.  In  his  preface 
to  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady— bis  most  illuminating  pro- 
nouncement upon  his  own  art — he  says  : 

1  Modernism  and  Romance,  p.  92 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  463 

"  I  was  myself  so  much  more  antecedently  conscious 
of  my  figures  than  of  their  setting  ...  I  might  envy, 
though  I  couldn't  emulate,  the  writer  so  constituted 
as  to  see  his  fable  first  and  to  make  out  its  agents 
afterwards.  I  could  think  so  little  of  any  fable  that 
didn't  need  its  agents  positively  to  launch  it ;  I  could 
think  so  little  of  any  situation  that  didn't  depend  for 
its  interest  on  the  nature  of  the  persons  situated,  and 
thereby  on  their  way  of  taking  it." 

In  other  words,  the  narrative  is  never  seen  directly  either 
by  the  author  or  the  reader,  but  seen  only  as  lived  and 
felt  by  persons  in  the  situations  of  the  drama.  Every- 
thing is  apprehended  on  the  mental  and  psychic  plane, 
nothing  is  seen  in  the  concrete  and  physical.  Not  in 
style,  nor  even  in  theory  is  Henry  James  set  apart  from 
other  novelists,  but  in  the  completeness  with  which  he 
removes  narrative  from  the  physical  world  to  the  mental. 
A  suggestion  of  comparison  between  Henry  James  and 
George  Meredith  is  often  offered  for  reflection.  The  com- 
parison is  insignificant.  Meredith  had  little  sense  of 
environing  atmosphere,  his  background  is  meagre,  and 
his  psychology  is  far  more  intensive  than  that  of  Henry 
James,  comprehending  man  as  a  creature  of  intellect, 
spiritual  emotion  and  the  impulses  of  the  flesh  :  the 
typical  novels  of  Henry  James  are  scarcely  more  than  a 
presentation  of  surface  psychology  and  atmosphere. 

Each  individual  exposes  to  the  world  mental  charac- 
teristics of  extreme  complexity,  characteristics  which  have, 
nevertheless,  little  play  in  the  inner  depths  of  the  con- 
scious and  subconscious  life  ;  they  are  not  the  substance 
of  personality  but  the  surface  shimmer,  the  ripple  moving 
across  the  face  of  the  waters.  So  much  each  man  must 
reveal  in  order  to  take  his  part  in  the  interactions  of 
social  life  ;  and  the  greater  the  tangle  of  the  environment 
the  larger  will  be  the  surface  exposed.  With  the  surface 
play  of  mental  phenomena  Henry  James  was  so  engrossed 
that  he  appeared  to  have  forgotten  that  the  earth  is  a 
globe  and  not  an  extended  plane.  No  writer  has  shown 
a  more  highly  developed  faculty  for  following  in  two 
dimensions  the  conflict  of  diverse  characters  and  minds. 
But  not  infrequently  in  real  life  each  individual  reveals 
to  a  few  of  his  or  her  kind  the  fountains  of  the  great  deep  ; 


464  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

in  the  novels  of  Henry  James  never,  or  scarcely  ever.  He 
wraps  even  the  passion  of  love  in  a  cloistral  and  studious 
sedateness.  Jane  Austen  could  not  have  written  as 
primly  of  Lord  Warburton's  proposal  to  Isabel  Archer. 
Decorum  was  never  more  distressfully  observed.  The  love 
passages  of  The  Wings  of  the  Dove  and  The  Golden  Bowl 
are  not  without  a  subdued  beauty,  but  the  pale  cast  of 
thought  chills  each  scene.  The  writing  of  Henry  James  is 
tense,  but  not  intense.  Through  hundreds  of  pages  we 
grope  after  the  mind  of  Maisie,  Isabel  Archer  or  Kate 
Croy  ;  and  in  the  end  we  ask  :  What  did  they  know,  or 
we  about  them  ?  Henry  James  studies  every  mind  as  if 
it  were  a  wide  and  shallow  pool ;  and  if  this  be  an  apt 
analogy  for  many,  there  are  other  minds  more  comparable 
to  the  deep  river  ever  flowing  onward. 

As  the  range  of  his  study  in  the  ramifications  of  mental 
phenomena  extended  itself  Henry  James  adopted  a  style 
so  verbose  and  involved  that  he  excited  against  himself 
the  outcries  Meredith  had  faced  before  him.  His  earlier 
manner,  save  for  occasional  lapses,  was  clear,  graceful, 
brief.  Only  occasionally  was  he  guilty  of  the  affected 
circumlocutions  which  became  characteristic  of  his  later 
style.  For  the  most  part  his  writing  is  subdued,  even 
old-maidish.  The  following  passage  from  The  Portrait  of 
a  Lady  reminds  us  of  Jane  Austen  in  one  of  her  worst 
moments,  or  Fanny  Burney  in  her  transitional  manner. 

"  He  carried  out  his  resolve  with  a  great  deal  of 
tact,  and  the  young  lady  found  in  renewed  contact 
with  him  no  obstacle  to  the  exercise  of  her  genius  for 
unshrinking  inquiry,  the  general  application  of  her 
confidence.  Her  situation  at  Gardencourt  therefore, 
appreciated  as  we  have  seen  her  to  be  by  Isabel  and 
full  of  appreciation  herself  of  that  free  play  of  intelli- 
gence which,  to  her  sense,  rendered  Isabel's  character  a 
sister-spirit,  and  of  the  easy  venerableness  of  Mr. 
Touchett,  whose  noble  tone,  as  she  said,  met  with  her 
full  approval — her  situation  at  Gardencourt  would  have 
been  perfectly  comfortable  had  she  not  conceived  an 
irresistible  mistrust  ofthe  little  lady  for  whom  she 
had  at  first  supposed  herself  obliged  to  '  allow '  as 
mistress  of  the  house-" 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  465 

In  this  and  many  other  passages  of  Henry  James's 
early  and  late  style  we  are  struck  by  nothing  so  much 
as  the  curiously  well-bred  maiden-lady  manner :  even 
when  he  writes  of  the  vices  of  modern  Babylons, 
or  of  irregular  sexual  relationships,  it  is  in  a  manner  so 
veiled  and  distantly  suggestive  that  we  barely  recognise 
them  for  what  they  are.  And  the  habit  grew  with 
him  ;  till  he  developed  in  his  later  books  that  indirect 
allusiveness  coupled  with  the  constant  effort  to  present 
narrative  from  a  "  point  of  view,"  which  has  produced 
that  involved,  prolix  and  metaphorical  style,  the  despair 
of  the  uninitated  unless  aided  by  essays  offering  "  light  on 
darkest  James."  If  Henry  James  was  fond  of  the  metaphor 
and  often  used  it  with  effect,  it  cannot  be  regarded  as 
the  life  and  soul  of  his  style,  as  it  was  with  Meredith. 
Rather  his  style  may  be  described  as  allusive,  the  style 
of  accumulative  hints  and  half-formed  suggestions.  By 
this  means  he  tried  to  reproduce  a  similitude  of  life's 
experience ;  for  knowledge  gained  of  experience  is  a 
knowledge  of  accumulated  small  detail.  The  knowledge 
of  a  friend's  character  is  gained  slowly  and  by  scattered 
hints — no  man  may  reveal  himself  entirely  to  his  fellows, 
however  long  his  life,  least  of  all  can  we  hope  to  learn 
the  whole  of  a  man's  character  in  a  single  flash  of  divina- 
tion. And  Henry  James,  realising  this,  attempted  to 
develop  to  an  extreme,  the  method  used  by  Balzac  and 
Thackeray — the  method  of  allusiveness. 

Were  life  lived  in  a  single  key  Henry  James's  manner 
might  be  adequate.  It  is  not.  In  a  great  crisis  a  man 
lives  and  reveals  himself  more  fully  than  he  can  in  a 
score  of  commonplace  years.  And  it  is  this  Henry  James's 
narrative  fails  to  convey ;  there  is  as  little  difference 
between  his  light  and  shade  as  exists  between  night  and 
day  in  an  English  midwinter.  The  note  is  too  even.  The 
page  shines  with  a  dim  and  uncertain  light ;  and  we  are 
led  to  sympathise  with  Mr.  George  Moore's  dictum,  that 
throughout  a  long  book  he  flutters  in  vain  after  the  right 
word,  never  finding  it. 

It  may  be  questioned,  furthermore,  whether  the  in- 
volved style  is  necessary  to  the  aim  of  his  later  work. 
There  is  nothing  in  his  last  novels  which  is  not  reached 
in  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady.  He  would  have  done 

2   H 


466  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

well  to  preserve  the  sedate  and  gentle  simplicity  of  that 
earlier  book. 

But  a  general  review  of  the  work  of  Henry  James  presses 
home  upon  us  the  admission  that  in  two  important  aspects 
his  novels,  especially  those  which  belong  to  the  close  of 
the  last  and  the  beginning  of  this  century,  have  exercised 
a  remarkable  influence  in  carrying  forward  the  story  of 
prose  fiction  in  its  evolution.  Stress  has  been  laid  upon 
his  endeavour  to  write  the  novel  from  a  "  point  of  view  "  ; 
and  in  this  no  one  has  yet  rivalled  him.  Furthermore, 
in  a  few  of  the  novels,  unduly  long  as  they  may  seem 
on  a  first  reading,  we  must  recognise  his  noteworthy 
success  in  conceiving  a  single  situation  in  the  form  of  a 
narrative  which  is  one  picture.  Unity  of  conception  com- 
bined with  unity  of  form  is  characteristic  of  such  books 
as  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady,  What  Maisie  Knew,  The  Golden 
Bowl,  The  Outcry  and  The  Ambassadors.  Of  the  last 
Henry  James  said,  "  I  am  able  to  estimate  this  as,  frankly, 
quite  the  best  '  all  round  '  of  my  productions."  The  story 
is  based  on  a  favourite  theme  worked  out  in  a  manner 
pre-eminently  typical  of  the  author.  A  New  England 
mother,  distressed  on  hearing  of  the  entanglement  of  a 
son  in  Paris,  dispatches  an  elderly  friend  to  save  the  boy. 
The  gradual  discovery  by  this  emissary  of  the  beautiful 
character  of  the  woman  who  has  gained  an  ascendency 
over  the  young  American  provides  the  author  with  an 
admirable  diploma  subject.  And  the  whole,  despite  the 
length  of  the  book,  is  conceived  and  presented  in  unity. 
The  same  judgment  applies  with  equal  force  to  the  slight 
and  brief  comedy  of  the  conflict  between  the  American 
art  collector  and  the  English  owner  of  pictures  contained 
in  The  Outcry. 

Henry  James  shrank  from  the  brutal  vulgarity  of  the 
event,  he  avoided  a  psychology  which  is  personal  and 
direct ;  his  characters  drift  in  reflections  across  the  mirror 
of  other  minds,  and  in  his  typical  novels  we  never  see 
them  in  the  flesh.  His  world  is  a  magic  mirror  of  innumer- 
able facets  and  angles  in  which  we  can  no  more  than 
catch  fleeting  and  changeful  glimpses  of  individuals  as 
they  pass.  Apart  from  the  two  theoretical  guides  already 
indicated — the  positing  of  the  "  point  of  view  "  and  the 
attempt  to  render  fiction  a  plastic  art — Henry  James's  later 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  467 

manner  was  the  result  of  an  effort  to  paint  new  charac- 
teristics of  English  social  life  which  emerged  in  the  closing 
years  of  the  last  century,  to  present  a  peculiarly  modern 
world.  In  this  he  showed  a  remarkable  faculty  of 
keeping  abreast  of  the  younger  generation ;  his  later 
writing  is  more  original  than  his  earlier  and  has  left  marks 
that  are  widely  traceable  in  the  work  of  living  English 
writers  of  the  novel. 

In  this  country  the  name  of  Mr.  William  Dean 
Howells  has  never  been  one  to  conjure  with,  he  has 
never  established  a  cult  or  an  enthu- 
William  Dean  siasm  like  Henry  James ;  yet  twenty  years 
Howells,  b.  1837.  ago  it  seemed  natural  to  call  him 
the  chief  of  American  novelists.  The 
reason  of  his  slight  significance  here  and  his  very  con- 
siderable effect  upon  American  fiction  is  intelligible. 
Though  a  born  man  of  letters  Mr.  Howells  has  never 
revealed  any  peculiar  originality  or  power.  Whatever 
his  work  had  to  offer  could  reach  English  writers  by  a 
shorter  and  more  direct  route.  His  method  is  that  of 
the  realists,  especially  that  of  Balzac  and  the  Russian 
novelists.  He  attempts  to  render  life  in  all  its  common- 
placeness,  yet  to  reveal  the  importance  of  the  common 
place.  He  essays  an  exact  representation  of  the  American 
scene,  avoiding  all  high  lights,  elaborate  analysis  or  the 
introduction  of  matter  extraneous  to  his  picture.  His 
end  is  clear  and  consistent  presentation  of  the  actual  fact. 
He  has  thus  set  the  standard  of  the  subdued  and  colour- 
less narrative  ;  and  his  instinctive  Tightness  as  an  observer 
and  a  stylist  has  enabled  him  to  influence  the  American 
novel  of  quiet  manners  and  slight  individual  interest  in 
a  degree  it  would  be  difficult  to  over-estimate. 

Mr.  Howells  had  been  for  some  twelve  years  or  more  a 
poet,  journalist,  editor,  biographer  and  topographical 
writer  before  he  published  his  first  novel,  Their  Wedding 
Journey,  in  1871.  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham  (1885),  A 
Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  (1889)  and  The  Quality  of  Mercy 
(1892)  are  among  the  best  of  the  many  tales  which  have 
succeeded  it.  It  may  be  that  the  ideal  Mr.  Howells  has 
set  before  himself  in  these  and  other  typical  novels  has 
been  too  constantly  in  his  mind.  Reserve,  subdued  lights, 
the  wholly  impersonal  manner  have  resulted  in  an  arid 


468  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

clearness  which  empties  life  of  much  of  its  zest,  joy  and 
stronger  reality.  It  is  certain  that  the  sources  of  his 
inspiration  have  long  shown  a  tendency  to  run  dry.  He 
has  hardly  again  equalled  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham. 
Many  of  his  tales  seem  to  be  written  as  experiments  in 
calculated  monotony.  Plot  in  the  ordinary  sense  he 
avoids  sedulously,  the  only  story  he  offers  is  some  account 
of  what  happens  to  his  people  and  a  glimpse  into  their 
emotions.  He  does  not  want  for  humour  and  a  delicate 
fantasy,  but  idealism  and  romance  he  eschews  ;  the  ideal 
and  perfect  character,  as  he  does  not  perceive  it  in  life, 
is  excluded  from  his  books.  Nevertheless,  though  his 
influence  has  sunk,  as  editor,  cicerone  and  novelist  he 
has  done  much  to  shape  the  writing  of  younger  men  in 
his  country. 

Like  Henry  James,  Francis  Marion  Crawford,  though 
of  American   parentage,   owed   little   to  the  country  of 

his  citizenship.  He  was  born  in  Italy 
Francis  Marion  and  educated  in  England  and  Ger- 
Crawford,  many  as  well  as  in  America,  he  first 

1854-1909.  took  to  literature  as  the  editor  of  the 

Allahabad  Indian  Herald,  he  lived  the 
greater  part  of  his  life  in  Italy,  and  he  made  clever  use 
of  his  cosmopolitan  experience  in  the  groundwork  of  his 
many  novels.  His  least  successful  books  were  his  novels 
of  American  life,  among  them  An  American  Politician 
(1886) ;  for  he  had  little  real  acquaintance  with  the 
United  States  and  wrote  of  the  country  at  second  hand. 
His  first  novel,  Mr.  Isaacs  (1882),  was  a  story  of  modern 
India  and  Oriental  theosophy.  It  was  quickly  followed 
by  many  others  in  which,  it  is  not  unjust  to  say,  Marion 
Crawford's  chief  purpose  was  to  entertain.  He  set  him- 
self to  cultivate  the  art  of  telling  a  story  in  an  interesting 
manner,  he  became  in  technique  an  admirable  story- 
teller, but  he  paid  the  price  in  the  gradual  conventionaliza- 
tion of  his  plots  and  characters.  His  literary  ideals  he 
has  frankly  avowed  in  The  Novel — What  It  Is  (1893) ; 
and  there  is  no  need  to  go  further  than  his  own  confession 
for  a  just  estimate  of  the  value  of  his  work.  He  disclaims 
classification  with  the  realists  or  romantic  writers,  believ- 
ing that  the  best  type  of  novel  should  contain  elements 
both  of  romanticism  and  realism,  he  deprecates  the  novel 


CHAP,  vl  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  469 

with  a  purpose,  save  a  purpose  which  leads  the  reader 
to  think  thoughts  "  not  too  serious,"  he  accepts  the  fact 
that  the  novelist,  if  he  treats  moral  questions,  should 
remember  that  many  of  his  readers  will  be  young  girls, 
and  the  function  of  the  novelist  he  summarises  finally  as 
the  making  of  "  pocket-theatres  out  of  words,"  that  is 
to  say,  novels  should  be  portable  dramas.  It  will  be  seen 
that  Marion  Crawford  did  not  pitch  his  standard  in  any 
mood  of  high  seriousness,  and  this  was,  so  far,  well.  He 
was  among  the  unfortunates  who  reach  their  ideal  because 
they  reach  within  their  grasp. 

The  loss  of  his  mother's  fortune,  when  he  was  yet  a 
young  man,  put  Marion  Crawford  under  the  necessity 
of  earning  his  living  :  it  was  incumbent  upon  him  to  be 
popular,  and  he  succeeded.  His  opportunities  were  many  : 
he  had  received  an  excellent  and  varied  education,  he  had 
been  born  into  an  atmosphere  of  art  (his  father  was  the 
sculptor,  Thomas  Crawford),  he  had  enjoyed  the  blessings 
of  money  and  ease,  he  was  by  native  gift  an  industrious 
and  rapid  worker.  Of  the  many  tales  he  published,  the 
best,  with  one  or  two  exceptions,  were  novels  of  Italian 
life.  Italy  and  the  Italians  he  knew  intimately,  and  in 
this  he  was  greatly  assisted  by  the  fact  that  he  had  joined 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  The  ambitious  semi- 
historical  trilogy  Saracinesca  (1887),  Sant'  Ilario  (1889) 
and  Don  Orsino  (1892),  was  indebted  to  his  knowledge  of 
modern  Rome.  It  illustrates  his  gift  of  creating  characters 
sufficiently  real  to  satisfy  the  reader  who  is  not  too 
critical,  and  of  placing  them  in  manufactured  situations 
which  are  neither  sensational  nor  preposterous.  None  of 
his  other  tales  of  Italy  fails  in  style,  interest  and  dramatic 
quality,  and  none  rises  above  the  level  of  secondary  fiction. 
In  addition  to  these  the  fanciful  and  sentimental  Cigarette 
Maker's  Romance  (1890)  deserves  to  be  named  for  its  style, 
its  vivid  imaginativeness  and  the  skilful  handling  of  its  plot. 

Perhaps  Marion  Crawford  was  happy  in  being  aware 
of  his  limitations.  He  drew  upon  his  varied  experience 
with  ease  and  grace,  he  wrote  writh  reserve  and  good 
taste,  his  characters  were  romantic  but  not  injudiciously 
so,  his  plots  were  conventional  but  they  were  not  beaten 
out  too  thin.  He  was  one  of  the  best  possible  examples 
of  the  skilled  and  gentlemanly  craftsman  in  the  art  of 


470  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

fiction.  And  in  fiction  alone  was  he  really  successful ; 
his  monographs  on  Italian  history  are  ill-arranged,  and, 
despite  the  dramatic  character  of  his  novels,  he  failed  as 
a  writer  for  the  stage. 

The  most  characteristic  novels  of  two  of  the  writers 
just  named  have  little  or  no  relationship  to  American 

life ;  those  of  Mr.  Howells  on  the 
George  Washington  other  hand,  are  certainly  typical  of 
Cable,  b.  1844.  the  life  and  habits  of  thought  of 

the  country  from  which  they  come; 
but  they  betray  also  the  influence  of  European  models 
and  standards,  and  Mr.  Howells'  method  was  set  over 
forty  years  ago  and  has  not  changed  appreciably  since. 
His  appeal  is  not  primarily,  like  that  of  Henry  James,  to 
the  present  generation  of  readers  and  writers.  It  has 
been  said  that  the  end  of  the  Civil  War  marked  the  be- 
ginning of  a  new  and  more  national  phase  in  American 
fiction,  a  period  which  has  seen  a  prolific  outpouring  of 
the  regional  and  dialect  novel ;  and  in  this  particular 
development  Marion  Crawford,  Henry  James  and  Mr. 
Howells  have  played  no  special  part.  In  a  large  number 
of  cases  writers  of  the  regional  novel  have  set  themselves 
to  describe  types  and  phases  of  social  life  destroyed  by 
the  war,  or  fated  soon  to  disappear.  Among  the  first 
to  be  conscious  of  the  charm  of  a  past  which  was  quickly 
fading  was  Mr.  George  Washington  Cable,  who  served 
in  the  Confederate  Army,  and  at  the  close  of  the  war 
returned  to  settle  in  New  Orleans,  the  city  of  his  birth. 
He  was  drawn  into  journalism  and  first  made  a  reputation 
by  sketches  and  tales  of  French-American  and  Creole 
life.  Several  of  these  tales  were  collected  in  1879  under 
the  title  of  Old  Creole  Days,  and  there  followed  other 
books — The  Grandissimes  (1880),  Madame  Delphine  (1881), 
Dr.  Sevier  (1883)  and  Bonaventure  (1888) — in  which,  in 
a  spirit  of  realism  touched  with  humour,  he  sketched  the 
life  of  the  south.  Mr.  Cable  has  no  exceptional  gifts,  but 
he  has  written  many  charming  scenes,  the  poetry  of  the 
south  is  in  his  pages,  he  has  a  good  and  unpretentious 
style,  and  his  novels  have  a  large  element  of  historical 
value  in  putting  upon  record  old  days  and  old  ways  in 
New  Orleans.  In  The  Grandissimes  and  Dr.  Sevier  he 
produced  faithful  and  discerning  pictures  of  a  type  of 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  471 

character  and  social  life.  Unfortunately  these  tales  and 
his  history,  The  Creoles  of  Louisiana  (1884),  gave  offence 
to  the  people  they  described,  and  Mr.  Cable  left  the  south 
to  settle  in  New  England. 

Mr.  James  Lane  Allen,  a  writer  better  known  to  most 
readers  in  this  country,  is  also  drawn  toward  the  romantic 

past.  After  spending  a  number  of 
James  Lane  Allen,  years  teaching  in  schools  and  academies 
b.  1849.  he  began  to  write  sketches  of  the 

"  Blue  Grass "  district  of  his  native 
Kentucky,  and  continued  with  stories  of  a  graceful  and 
sentimental  character.  Among  these  are  A  Kentucky 
Cardinal  (1894),  Aftermath  (1895),  The  Choir  Invisible 
(1897)  and  The  Increasing  Purpose  (1900).  Nearly  all 
Mr.  Allen's  writing  suffers  from  stylistic  self -consciousness ; 
in  his  later  books  he  loses  something  of  his  earlier 
simplicity  and  even  abandons  himself  to  mere  verbiage. 
The  Choir  Invisible,  a  tale  of  the  early  settlement  of 
Kentucky,  has,  however,  an  undercurrent  of  stronger 
feeling  and  is  built  upon  firmer  foundations  than  his  other 
books.  In  this  historical  romance  he  has  been  able  to 
restrain  the  self-conscious  manner  and  nervous  senti- 
mentality which  are  characteristic  of  him. 

Harold  Frederic  made  a  name  for  himself  as  a  chronicler 
of  rural   life   in  the    state   of  New  York   after   he   had 

become  London  correspondent  of  the 
Harold  Frederic,  New  York  Times  and  settled  in  England. 
1856-1898.  Frederic  was  as  instinctively  a  satirist 

as  Mr.  Allen  is  a  graceful  sentimentalist. 
His  first  novel  of  any  importance  was  Seth's  Brother's 
Wife  (1887).  This  was  followed  by  The  Lawton  Girl  (1890) 
and  The  Copperhead  (1894),  a  story  of  the  Civil  War. 
But  his  powers  of  ironical  insight  into  the  failings  and 
pettiness  of  human  nature  were  best  illustrated  in  Illumina- 
tion (1896)  and  Gloria  Mundi  (1898).  Illumination 
(called  in  America,  The  Damnation  of  T  her  on  Ware) 
was  a  realistic,  witty  and  satirical  picture  of  religious  life 
in  the  American  shopkeeper  class.  By  far  Frederic's  best 
book,  it  is  hardly  a  gracious  document ;  it  was  un- 
likely to  mend  the  objects  of  its  satire  and  it  gave  the 
indifferent  ground  for  derision.  It  is  brilliantly  clever, 
but  with  a  superficial  cleverness.  Gloria  Mundi,  a  story  of 


472  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

English  upper-class  life,  is  by  no  means  as  vivid ;  nor  does 
it  bear  good  witness  to  Frederic's  spontaneity  and  abund- 
ance of  ironical  humour.  Illumination  was  his  one  striking 
book ;  exaggerated  perhaps,  but  full  of  insight  and  matter. 
The  stories  contained  in  A  Humble  Romance  (1887) 
first  brought  Mary  Eleanor  Wilkins  (Mrs.  C.  M.  Freeman) 

into  prominence  as  an  annalist  of  life 
Mary  Eleanor  in  rural  New  England.  The  first  was 
Wilkins,  b.  1862.  succeeded  by  a  number  of  other  volumes 

of  short  stories.  Her  tales  involve  no 
great  problems,  they  turn  upon  simple  and  pathetic  love 
themes,  upon  misunderstandings,  upon  the  history  of 
bygone  New  England,  but  they  all  manifest  a  fine  sense 
of  economy  in  the  portrayal  of  character,  and  each  narra- 
tive is  skilfully  and  firmly  rounded.  In  the  last-named 
characteristic  her  novels,  with  the  possible  exception  of 
The  Shoulders  of  Atlas  (1907),  will  hardly  compare  with 
the  short  stories.  They  are  too  slight  in  motive  and  might 
better  have  been  told  in  briefer  compass.  Mrs.  Freeman 
is  not  a  daring  and  original,  but  she  is  a  careful  and 
observant  writer,  studying  with  sympathy  the  humdrum 
lives  of  the  middle  class  and  the  poor. 

A    more    vigorous    character    distinguishes    the    local 
and   dialect   tales   of   '  Charles  Egbert   Craddock '    (Miss 

Mary  Noailles  Murfree).  Her  stories  of 
Charles  Egbert  the  mountain  people  of  Tennessee  were 
Oraddock,  b.  1850.  first  contributed  to  the  Atlantic  Monthly, 

and  suggested  by  their  force  in  the 
description  of  rough  and  simple  life  that  they  came  from 
the  hand  of  a  man  rather  than  a  woman.  In  1884  early 
stories  were  collected  under  the  title  In  the  Tennessee 
Mountains,  and  this  collection  has  since  been  followed  by 
others  to  a  large  extent  dealing  with  that  corner  of  the 
American  continent  which  Miss  Murfree  best  knows. 

Mr.  Thomas  Nelson  Page  and  Miss  Ellen  Glasgow  are 
two  writers  who  come  from  the  south  and  write  of  Virginia. 

In  Ole  Virginia  (1887)  was  Mr.  Page's 
Thomas  Nelson  first  volume  to  attract  attention,  and  this 
Page,  b.  1853.  was  followed  by  Elsket  (1891),  Pastime 

Stones  (1894),  Bred  in  the  Bone  (1904), 
and  various  volumes  of  short  stories,  which  have  the  merit 
of  sketching  with  knowledge  and  humour  the  amenities  of 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  473 

Virginian  life  before  the  character  of  the  land  was  changed 
by  the  disasters  of  the  Civil  War. 

Miss  Ellen  Glasgow  is  a  more  ambitious  writer  ;    her 
narrative  commonly  embodies,  in  one  form  or  another, 

the  conflict  between  the  older  aristo- 
Ellen  Glasgow,  cratic  life  of  Virginia  and  the  new 
b.  1874.  democratic  ideals  forced  upon  it  by 

defeat.  The  Deliverance  (1904)  is  a 
story  of  this  type.  And  the  difficulties  of  a  new  period, 
as  they  are  illustrated  in  the  relationship  of  men  and 
women  of  differing  social  caste  and  ideals,  appear  in  the 
much  finer  Romance  of  a  Plain  Man  (1909)  and  The  Miller 
of  Old  Church  (1911).  Virginia  (1913)  scarcely  opens  out 
any  new  vein  in  plot  or  idea,  nor  does  it  serve  to  induce 
an  enhanced  belief  in  Miss  Glasgow's  powers  for  those 
who  know  her  already.  She  is  undeniably  a  gifted  and 
thoughtful  writer  who  can  give  life  to  her  characters  and  set 
her  people  within  an  atmosphere,  the  atmosphere  of  social 
convention,  work  and  leisured  idleness  in  new-old  Virginia. 
Mr.  Owen  Wister  has  written  in  differing  veins  and  of 
differing  scenes,  but  his  typical  tales  relate  the  romance 

of  cowboy  life  in  the  west.  To  this  class 
Owen  Wister,  belong  the  stories  of  the  early  Jimmyjohn 
b.  1860.  Boss  (1900)  and  the  late  Members  of  the 

Family  (1911).  But  his  two  books  of 
some  importance  are  his  one  full-length  novel,  The  Vir- 
ginian (1902)  and  the  short  fantasy,  Lady  Baltimore 
(1906).  These  two  are  of  an  entirely  different  character, 
the  former  a  story  of  cowboy  life,  the  latter  a  piece  of 
psychology  betraying  the  influence  of  Henry  James. 
The  Virginian  is,  in  its  separate  chapters,  a  series  of  sketches 
rather  than  a  novel ;  but  it  is  well  sustained  by  ease  in 
narration,  a  humour  that  is  delightful  and  unforced  and 
an  excellent  style. 

Mr.  Hardy,  in  England,  confines  his  scene  to  one  small 
county  or  little  more,  yet  he  invests  the  story  of  obscure 

lives  with  a  meaning  bounded  only  by 
Frank  Norris,  the  mystery  of  the  whence  and  wither 

1870-1902.  of  the  whole  race  of  man.     And  this  he 

achieves  not  by  force  of  the  unshrinking 
realism  commonly  attributed  to  him,  but  because  he 
conceives  a  story  written  in  prose  as  the  world-poet  con- 


474  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

ceives  the  drama  of  existence  mirrored  in  the  sturm  und 
drang  of  a  few  souls.  The  American  writers  named  above 
localise  their  scenes  in  accord  with  individual  knowledge 
and  familiarity,  and  for  the  most  part  (Miss  Glasgow  is 
something  of  an  exception)  seek  no  more  than  the  faithful 
rendering  of  ordinary  life  in  one  or  another  corner  of  the 
United  States.  Others,  sometimes  perhaps  influenced  by 
Mr.  Hardy,  more  often  by  Zola,  see  in  the  experience  of 
the  individual  or  a  group  of  persons  a  national  or  world 
drama.  They  begin  not  with  the  men  and  women,  but 
with  a  large  social  or  ethical  conception,  and  weave  their 
story  to  illustrate  or  enforce  their  theme.  Among  writers 
thus  actuated  Frank  Norris  is,  perhaps,  first  to  be  named  ; 
for  his  books  are  a  typical  example  of  the  novel  with  a 
"  big  idea."  He  drew  attention  to  himself  with  the 
forcible  and  realistic  McTeague  (1899) ;  but  all  his  powers 
were  thrown  into  an  incomplete  trilogy,  The  Octopus 
(1901),  The  Pit  (1903),  and  The  Wolf  which  was  planned 
though  never  written.  The  three  were  to  form  an  epic 
of  wheat  from  the  time  of  its  sowing  in  California,  through 
its  distribution  at  Chicago  to  its  consumption  in  Europe. 
The  novels  were  conceived  on  a  large  scale,  the  basic 
idea  was  full  of  possibilities,  and  Frank  Norris  almost 
succeeded  in  The  Octopus  and  The  Pit  in  making  wheat, 
like  some  vast  symbol  or  brooding  destiny,  enshroud  the 
story.  But  he  just  came  short  of  complete  success.  The 
power  of  the  wheat  is  not  inwoven  in  the  texture  of  the 
narrative,  it  is  paraded  in  set  passages  ;  and  the  little- 
ness of  man,  who  is  no  more  than  a  mote  or  an  insect 
subservient  to  the  world-drama  of  food  production,  is 
flung  upon  us,  it  is  hammered  in,  we  are  not  made  in- 
stinctively to  feel  it.  Frank  Norris  was  possessed  of  great 
imaginative  daring,  he  was  an  exceptionally  powerful 
writer,  but  he  was,  at  the  same  time,  a  young  man,  and 
the  fulfilment  of  his  intention  lay  beyond  him.  Further- 
more, in  the  matter  of  style  and  method  he  had  much 
to  learn.  In  narrative  and  diction  he  was  prone  to  extra- 
vagance and  bombast,  and  he  was  troubled  with  monoton- 
ous tricks  of  style — one  of  the  most  frequent  is  the  noun 
followed  by  three  adjectives — which  recur  on  almost 
every  page.  The  Pit  hinted  that  he  would  outgrow  these 
faults  and  the  belief  that  big  and  clumsy  words  make 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  475 

for  strength  and  fine  writing.  Had  Norris  lived  he  would 
almost  undoubtedly  have  produced  work  better  by  far 
than  any  he  has  left  behind  him. 

Mr.  Upton  Sinclair  has  attempted  something  like  the 
same  largeness  of  theme  in  The  Jungle  (1906),  a  novel 

which  has  overshadowed  his  other  books. 
Upton  Sinclair,  It  is  a  story  of  Chicago  stockyards,  of 
b.  1878.  conflict  between  labour  and  capital,  of 

injustice,  of  political  swindling.  Mr. 
Upton  Sinclair  can  paint  individual  scenes  and  characters 
forcibly,  but  in  this  and  other  tales,  The  Overman  (1907), 
Love's  Pilgrimage  (1911)  and  Sylvia  (1913),  the  bias  of 
the  author,  his  socialistic  creed,  his  theory  of  the  relation 
of  the  sexes  is  too  obtrusive,  the  spirit  of  the  ex  parte 
tract  vitiates  the  narrative.  Mr.  Sinclair  is  too  much 
a  special  pleader  and  man  of  theories  to  be  a  good  artist ; 
although  in  one  book,  undoubtedly,  despite  a  large  element 
of  sensationalism,  he  has  succeeded  in  drawing  some  living 
characters. 

Mr.   Winston   Churchill's   later  books   suggest  that  he 
has  set  himself  the  task  of  covering  the  whole  ground 

of  American  life,  politics,'  marriage  and 
Winston  Churchill,  religion.  He  began,  however,  as  a  writer 
b.  1871.  of  romances.  Richard  Carvel  (1899)  is  a 

disconnected  and  somewhat  shapeless 
historical  tale  with  a  scene  laid  partly  in  Maryland 
and  partly  in  England.  The  Crisis  (1901),  a  story  of 
the  Civil  War,  and  The  Crossing  (1904),  in  which  the 
fictitious  element  is  set  against  an  account  of  the  early 
conquest  of  Kentucky  and  Tennessee,  are  also  romances, 
carefully  and  elaborately  written  but  loose  and  strag- 
gling in  structure.  From  these  Mr.  Churchill  turned  to 
a  more  serious  representation  of  his  country.  Coniston 
(1906),  a  tale  of  political  jobbery  in  New  England, 
despite  the  traces  of  laboured  care  loses  nothing  in  the 
vitality  of  its  character-portrayal,  and  the  plot  is  handled 
with  a  greater  sense  of  form  than  in  any  of  the  .earlier 
books.  A  Modern  Chronicle  (1910)  is  scarcely  so  good  a 
book.  Mr.  Churchill  is  lengthy  without  excuse ;  and 
this  story  of  the  unfortunate  marriages  of  a  modern 
American  woman,  clever  as  a  piece  of  character-study, 
suffers  from  excessive  elaboration  of  a  flimsy  and  monoto- 


476  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

nous  plot  motive.  American  politics,  the  problem  of 
married  life  in  modern  America,  occupied  Mr.  Churchill 
in  Coniston  and  A  Modern  Chronicle,  and  from  these  he 
turned  to  discuss  the  religion  of  the  country  in  The  Inside 
of  the  Cup  (1913).  This  is  an  American  version  of  The 
Case  of  Richard  Meynell,  and  the  strong  family  likeness 
between  the  writing  of  Mr.  Churchill  and  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward  is  here  emphasised.  Mr.  Churchill  takes  himself 
seriously,  he  has  little  lightness,  he  is  an  intellectual  and 
the  pose  of  the  teacher  is  gaining  upon  him.  He  is  plainly 
not  an  easy  or  facile  writer,  and  intellectual  considerations 
weigh  more  heavily  with  him  than  the  more  unconscious 
aims  of  the  artist.  It  is  rather  by  sheer  force  of  intellect 
than  by  any  natural  gifts  that  Mr.  Churchill  reaches  his 
ends. 

Professor  Robert  Herrick,  after  publishing  one  or  two 
novels  which  scarcely  call  for  comment,  suddenly  made  a 

name  for  himself  with  The  Gospel  of 
Robert  Herrick,  Freedom  (1898),  a  study  in  the  now 
b.  1868.  much  overworked  topic — the  ill-mated 

wife's  awakening  to  a  spirit  of  emancipa- 
tion. It  was  some  years  before  he  again  wrote  novels  of 
equal  value,  The  Common  Lot  (1904)  and  The  Memoirs 
of  an  American  Citizen  (1905)  ;  and  these  were  followed 
by  the  still  finer  Together  (1908).  The  first  two  are  indict- 
ments of  dishonest  commercial  enterprise,  the  third 
another  of  the  many  studies  in  the  problem  of  marriage. 
In  these  books  Professor  Herrick  shows  himself  a  thought- 
ful writer,  but  given  to  overloading  his  narrative,  a  fault 
which  he  developed  still  further  in  A  Life  for  a  Life  (1910), 
in  which  his  quest  of  epic  grandeur  leads  him  to  exag- 
gerated sensationalism  and  the  introduction  of  a  great 
overweight  in  the  discussion  of  sociological  problems. 

Nearly  all  the  writers  named  above  write  the   short 
story,  and  in  the  case  of  several  it  either  represents  the 

greater  part  of  their  work  or  that 
Ambrose  Bierce,  activity  in  which  they  are  most  success- 
b.  1842.  ful.  The  number  of  American  tale 

writers  is  so  great  that  an  attempt  to 
name  or  discuss  individual  authors  would  be  fruitless; 
and  in  the  majority  of  cases  the  level  of  attainment  is 
not  sufficiently  high  to  call  for  special  notice.  But  among 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  477 

writers  of  the  short  story  Mr.  Ambrose  Bierce  cannot  be 
left  without  mention.  His  strongest  liking  is,  perhaps, 
for  the  writing  of  a  fierce  and  heavy-handed  type  of 
satirical  verse,  of  which  the  most  characteristic  part  has 
been  gathered  in  Shapes  of  Clay  (1903).  But  the  only 
quality  of  his  satire  is  its  downrightedness  ;  it  lacks  wit, 
flexibility  and  point.  As  a  writer  of  short  stories  he  is 
on  his  own  ground.  The  best  of  these  are  collected  in  a 
volume  entitled  In  the  Midst  of  Life  (first  called  Tales 
of  Soldiers  and  Civilians,  1892),  a  collection  based  on  the 
author's  experiences  in  the  Civil  War,  and  a  volume  of 
fantastic  and  supernatural  tales,  Can  Such  Things  Be  ? 
(1894).  Mr.  Bierce  is  a  disciple  of  Poe,  and  in  the  best 
of  his  short  stories  he  is  little  behind  his  master  in  his 
handling  of  the  morbid  and  gruesome.  The  method 
in  each  tale  is  the  same.  He  conducts  his  story 
exactly  stage  by  stage  to  an  unexpected  and  grimly 
ironical  climax,  and  leaves  the  reader  horrified.  The 
last  word  may  be  used  advisedly,  for  not  seldom  Mr. 
Bierce  seems  to  dilate  upon  the  disgusting  and  repulsive 
for  its  own  sake,  until  sometimes — the  story  called  '  The 
Coup  de  Grace  '  is  a  case  in  point — the  horrible  is  in 
danger  of  becoming  the  whole  raison  d'etre  of  the  story. 
Besides  the  device  of  the  ironical  climax  Mr.  Bierce  dis- 
plays a  constant  interest  in  the  attempt  to  represent  an 
eternity  of  agony  lived  in  a  few  moments — e.g.  the 
prisoner  with  the  noose  about  his  neck  awaiting  execution, 
the  mental  torture  of  the  man  mesmerised  by  the  gleam 
of  a  serpent's  eyes.  Mr.  Bierce  is  a  past-master  in  the 
art  of  the  macabre  tale. 

Jack    London,    although    he    wrote     several     novels, 
was   by   gift    a   writer   of  the   brief    sketch   and    short 

story.  He  could  not  conceive  a  long  plot 
Jack  London,  as  a  whole  or  bring  a  number  of  characters 

1876-1916.  together  in  a  coherent  narrative.     His 

tales  are  by  no  means  of  equal  value  ; 
they  relate  to  wild  and  savage,  to  vagrant  and  curious 
life  in  every  corner  of  the  globe,  and  many  bear  traces 
of  the  hurried  rate  at  which  they  were  written  and 
relinquished  to  the  press.  The  style  is  sometimes  ugly, 
and  it  is  beset  with  the  common  American  fault  of  exag- 
gerated language ;  but  in  one  thing  Jack  London 


478  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

hardly  fails — in  his  wonderfully  vivid  and  realistic  paint- 
ing of  landscape,  colour  and  atmosphere.  In  this  faculty 
he  is  an  artist  in  words  whom  no  living  American  writer 
can  rival.  And  the  finest  examples  of  his  achievement 
in  this  particular  field  are  to  be  found  in  his  stories  of 
human  and  animal  life  in  Alaska.  Burning  Daylight  (1910) 
is  probably  the  best  tale  of  the  Klondike  gold-rush  yet 
written.  The  frozen  silence  of  earth  and  sky  in  that 
northern  region  is  painted  with  an  exactness  which  no 
experience  could  make  more  vivid  to  the  mind.  Unfor- 
tunately he  was  no  novelist,  and  this  book  collapses 
in  its  latter  half  into  a  collection  of  comparatively 
uninteresting  incidents  in  the  hero's  career.  And  not 
less  powerful  than  the  earlier  half  of  Burning  Daylight 
are  those  splendid  tales  of  dog  and  wolf  life,  The  Call  of 
the  Wild  (1903)  and  White  Fang  (1907).  Jack  London 
wandered  far  and  wide,  but  the  Klondike,  whither 
he  went  in  the  early  days  of  the  gold-rush,  seized  the 
young  man's  imagination  as  no  part  of  his  later  experience 
moved  him.  In  his  many  short  stories  and  tales  of 
the  northern  wilds  he  reached  his  highest  standard  as  a 
literary  craftsman. 

Among  America's  many  women  writers  Mrs.  Atherton 
has  won  a  reputation  for  the  intellectual  power  of  her 

work.  Nevertheless  she  is  an  un- 
Gertrude  Franklin  equal  writer.  Rulers  of  Kings  (1904), 
Atherton,  b.  1859.  a  romance  of  an  American's  relations 

with  a  royal  family  of  Europe,  is 
preposterous  to  the  point  of  weariness  ;  and  the  book 
seems  to  exemplify  not  only  deliberate  exaggeration  but 
a  want  of  balance  in  the  author.  In  each  of  Mrs.  Atherton's 
books  we  have  the  study  of  a  single  individual  set  in  the 
midst  of  a  particular  environment  which  moulds  the 
character.  In  The  Calif ornians  (1898)  a  Spanish-American 
girl  attempts  to  break  loose  from  the  fetters  of  hidalgo 
concepts  of  life.  Senator  North  (1900)  is  a  picture  of  an 
American  girl,  taught  to  despise  politics,  and  her  contact 
with  political  life  in  Washington.  In  The  Tower  of  Ivory 
(1910)  a  well-born  young  Englishman  in  diplomatic  circles, 
starved  by  a  small  income  and  lavish  tastes,  is  studied 
in  his  relationship  with  the  artistic  and  the  conventional 
feminine  types.  But  the  finest  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  books 


CHAP,  v]  AMERICAN  NOVELISTS  479 

is  Ancestors  (1907),  in  which  we  watch  the  instincts  of  a 
Californian  ancestry  bearing  fruit  in  the  mind  and  character 
of  a  young  Englishman.  Mrs.  Atherton's  varied  experience 
enables  her  to  write  of  many  scenes,  characters  and  places. 
She  is  in  familiar  touch  with  several  phases  of  life,  she 
writes  with  a  masculine  rather  than  a  feminine  outlook 
on  the  world,  and  she  has  imagination.  But  she  is  wanting 
in  reserve  and  in  sense  of  form,  and  is  therefore  unable  to 
distinguish  between  her  best  and  gross  lapses  into  the 
absurd  and  sensational. 

Of  a  very  different  character  is  the  writing  of  Kate 
Douglas  Wiggin  (Mrs.  George  C.  Riggs)  whose  preoccupa- 
tion with  kindergartens  has  coloured  all 
Kate  Douglas  her  writing  and  given  her  a  constant 
Wiggin,  b.  1857.  interest  in  child  life.  In  hardly  any  of 
her  books  can  she  be  called  the  novelist  ; 
she  is  rather  the  naive,  bright  and  entertaining  story- 
teller, receptive  and  gifted  with  a  native  charm  in  setting 
down  her  impressions.  Her  books  are  impressionistic 
sketches  of  childhood,  of  New  England  life,  of  an  American 
girl's  experiences  in  the  older  world.  The  Story  of  Patsy 
(1889)  and  Timothy's  Quest  (1890)  show  how  clearly  she 
has  penetrated  into  the  workings  of  the  childish  mind. 
Penelope's  English  Experiences  (1893)  is  a  miscellany  hung 
upon  a  slight  story,  and  was  followed  by  other  Penelope 
books  descriptive  of  the  American  point  of  view  in  relation 
to  other  parts  of  the  British  Isles.  But  Kate  Douglas 
Wiggin' s  best  work  is  to  be  found  in  the  Rebecca  series, 
beginning  with  Rebecca  of  Sunnybrook  Farm  (1903),  which 
paints  sympathetically,  happily,  with  humour  and  optimism 
the  not  very  gay  life  of  agricultural  New  England.  In 
these  easy-going  chronicles  her  simple  method  of  narration 
finds  its  natural  expression. 

Mrs.   Edith  Wharton  is   one  of  the  ablest  and  most 
thoughtful  of  living  American  writers.    Her  short  stories, 
and  with  these  she  began,  are  of  a  type 
Edith  Wharton,       and  character  which  raise  them  far  above 
b.  1862.  the  short  story  approved  by  the  common 

magazine  of  the  day.  The  tales  con- 
tained in  The  Greater  Inclination  (1899),  Crucial  Instances 
(1901)  and  The  Descent  of  Man  (1904)  turn  upon  mental 
processes  and  the  clash  of  moral  motives,  they  relate 


480  THE  NOVEL  [PART  iv 

the  tragedy  of  misunderstanding,  of  illusion,  of  the  irony 
of  circumstance  ;  and  the  "  point  of  view,"  as  under- 
stood by  Henry  James,  enters  largely  into  them.  Mrs. 
Wharton  is  an  introspective  writer ;  for  her  the  world 
of  the  mind  is  everything,  and  the  event  is  only  a  reflex 
of  inner  experience.  In  this  respect  she  would  have  suc- 
ceeded even  better  had  she  not  been  led  away  by  the  lure 
to  which  so  many  American  writers  succumb,  the  desire 
to  use  the  story  of  the  individual  as  typical  of  some  phase 
of  life  or  a  social  problem. 

The  House  of  Mirth  (1905)  is  the  best  example  of  Mrs. 
Wharton' s  gifts  as  a  writer.  It  is  a  close  and  clear-sighted 
study  of  the  woman  of  fine  education  and  tastes  drawn 
into  tragedy  for  the  want  of  money  to  satisfy  these  tastes 
and  an  inability  to  marry  a  social  and  intellectual  inferior 
merely  for  the  sake  of  money.  The  converse  of  this  story 
— a  woman  of  vulgar  taste  and  training  striving  for  a 
place  in  society — The  Custom  of  the  Country  (1913),  is 
also  a  striking  book  ;  but  it  is  less  restrained,  and  its 
satire  sometimes  borders  on  the  extravagant.  The  Fruit 
of  the  Tree  (1907)  handles  a  grave  moral  problem,  but 
the  central  theme  is  broken  up  by  irrelevant  matter.  It 
cannot  be  placed  with  the  best  of  Mrs.  Wharton' s  books. 
Better  are  the  slight  but  wonderfully  perspicuous  narratives 
of  Madame  de  Treymes  (1907)  and  The  Reef  (1912),  which 
contain  all  that  goes  to  prove  Mrs.  Wharton' s  fine  know- 
ledge of  the  influence  of  custom  and  convention  in  the 
conflict  of  human  desires  and  failings.  These  and  The 
House  of  Mirth  mark  Mrs.  Wharton  as  a  writer  distin- 
guished] in  style,  epigrammatic  force  and  a  knowledge  of 
the  recondite  workings  of  the  human  mind. 


INDEX 


<c  A.  E."    See  Russell,  Geo.  W. 
A  Rebours  (Huysmans),  283 
Abbey  Theatre.    See  Irish  Literary 

Theatre 
Abercrombie,  Lascelles,  on  Hardy's 

Dynasts,  58;  as  poet,  100-103 
Aberdeenshire,  347 
Absolom  (Moore),  122 
Academy,  The,  75 
According  to  Plato  (Moore),  343 
Account      of       Milton's       Prosody 

(Bridges),  9 
Actions    and    Reactions    (Kipling), 

306 

Adam  Cast  Forth  (Doughty),  92 
Admirable   Crichton,    The    (Barrie), 

265 

Admirals  All  (Newbolt),  113 
Adnam's     Orchard     (Grand),     430, 

431 

Adrian  Savar/e  (Malet),  440 
Adventurer  of  the  North,  An  (Parker) 

335 
Adventures  of  Gerard,  The  (Doyle), 

334 
Adventures    of    Harry    Revel,    The 

(Quiller-Couch),  331 
Adventures     of     Sherlock     Holmes 

(Doyle),  334 
Aeromancy  (Woods),  17 
Affair  of  Dishonour,  An  (De  Mor- 
gan), 386 

After  Sunset  (Marriott  Watson),  148 
Aftermath  (Allen),  471 
Agonists,  The  (Hewlett),  88,  89,  90, 

121 

Alastor  (Shelley),  41,  71 
Albemarle,  The,  316 
Alexander,  Sir  George,  76 
Alice  for  Short  (De  Morgan),  386 
All  on  the  Irish  Shore  (Somerville 

and  Ross),  452 

Allan  Quartermain  (Haggard),  332 
Allen,  Grant,  as  novelist,  337 
Allen,  James  Lane,  as  novelist,  471 
Almayer's  Folly  (Conrad),  388 


Amazons,  The  (Pinero),  229 
Ambassador,  The  (Hobbes),  443 
Ambassadors,     The    (James),    460, 

462,  466 

America,  South,  328,  329 
American,  The  (James),  459 
American    Literature,    Beginnings, 

456 

American  novelists,  455  seqq. 
American    Politician,     An    (Craw- 
ford), 468 

American  Prisoner  (Phillpotts),  376 
Amoris  Victima  (Symons),  23 
Ancestors  (Atherton),  457,  479 
Ancient  Mariner,   The  (Coleridge), 

72 
Anna  of  the  Five  Towns  (Bennett), 

366 

Anne  Mauleverer  (Iota),  434 
Ann    Veronica   (Wells),    361,    362, 

363,  364 
Anstey,  F.  (T.  Anstey  Guthrie),  as 

novelist,  344-345 
Anthea's  Guest  (Sidgwick),  449 
Anticipations  (Wells),  359 
Antrim,  185 
Aphrodite  Against  Artemis  (Moore), 

122 

Aquamarines  (Hopper),  189 
Arabia,  90 
Aran  Islands,  The,  J.  M.  Synge  and. 

206 

Aran  Islands,  The  (Synge),  207,  208 
Archer,  Wm.,  on  Laurence  Binyon, 
83  ;    collaborator  with  Geo.  Ber- 
nard Shaw,  242 
Argyllshire,  349 

Arminel  of  the  West  (Trevena),  380 
Arms  and  the  Man  (Shaw),  243 
Arnim,  Countess  von.     See  "  Eliza- 
beth " 

Arnold,  Sir  Edwin,  18 
Arnold,    Matthew,    xi,    xii,     xviii, 
and  insularity  in  literature,  155 ; 
reputation  as  a  sceptic,  420  ;   and 
religion  in  England,  422 


2  I 


481 


482 


INDEX 


Arnold,  Thomas,  420-421 
Art  and  passing  problems,  277 
"Art  for  art's  sake,"  xiv 
Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,  The  (John- 
son), 55,  66,  177 
Artemision  (Hewlett),  87,  88 
Arthurian  legends,   Tennyson   and 

the,  113 

As  it  was  Written  (Harland),  319 
Aspern  Papers,  The  (James),  459 
At  the  Gate  of  Samaria  (Locke),  405 
Atalanla  in  Calydon   (Swinburne), 

xiv 
Athenceum,      The,     Watts  -  Dunton 

and,  11 
Atherton,  Gertrude  F.,  as  novelist, 

457,  478-479 
Attila  (Binyon),  85 
Auld  Licht  Idylls  (Barrie),  350 
Auld  Licht  Manse,  An  (Barrie),  350 
Aunt  Anne  (Clifford),  449 
Aurora  la  Cujifii    (Graham),   328 
Austen,  Jane,  275,  418,  424,  451 
Austin,   Alfred,   and  the  Victorian 
era,  4  ;    as  poet,  6-9  ;   liis  theory 
of  poetry,  9  ;    and  Byron,  14 
Australia,  344 
Autobiography     of     a     Boy,      The 

(Street),  410 
Autobiography  of  Mark  Rutherford, 

The,  314 

Autumn  Garden,  The  (Goose),  14 
Ave  (Moore),  286 
Aveugles,  Les  (Maeterlinck),  166 
Awakening,  The  (Chambers),  236 
Awkward  Age,  The  (James),  462 
Aylwin  (Watts-Dunton),  11,  313 

Babe,  B.A.,  The  (Benson),  344 

Bobs  the  Impossible  (Grand),  430 

Bage,  Robert,  275 

Balestier,  Wolcott,  collaborates 
with  Kipling,  305 

Ball,  The,  and  the  Cross  (Chester- 
ton), 412 

'Ballad  of  a  Barber,  The'  (Beards- 
ley),  xxi 

Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,  The  (Wilde), 
4,  5 

Ballad  of  the  White  Horse,  The 
(Chesterton),  125,  126 

Ballades  in  Blue  China  (Lang),  13 

Ballads  (Masofield),  97 

Ballads  and  Lyrics  (Tynan),  190 

Ballads  and  Songs  (Davidson),  26 

Ballads  in  Prose  (Hopper),  189 

Balzac,  Honore  de,  as  writer,  273  ; 
and  Geo.  Moore,  285 


Bancroft,  Sir  Squire  and  Lady,  226 
Barbara  of  tJte  Thorn  (Syrett),  450 
Baring-Gould,     Rev.     Sabine,     aa 

writer  and  novelist,  333 
Barker,  H.  Granville,  as  dramatist, 

248-250 
Barlow,  Jane,   as  poet,    184,   185  ; 

as  novelist,  451 
Barrack-room  Ballads  (Kipling),  35, 

37,  38 
Barrie,  Sir  James  M.,  as  dramatist,. 

265-266  ;    as  novelist,  349-352  ; 

use  of  dialect,  382 
Battle  of  the  Strong,  The  (Parker)* 

336 

Baudelaire,  Chas.,  22 
Beacon,  The  (Phillpotts),  376 
Beaconsfield,     Benjamin     Disraeli, 

Lord,  443 
Beardsley,  Aubrey,  The  Yellow  Book, 

xviii,    xx ;    The    Savoy,    xx ;   as 

writer,  xxi,  xxii 
Becket  (Tennyson),  224 
Beddoes,  Thos.  Lovell,  191,  224. 
Beeching,  Dean  Henry  C.,  as  poet, 

110-111  ;   as  nature  poet,  127 
Beerbohm,  Max,  on  the  end  of  th& 

Victorian  era,  xii ;  contributor  to 

The  Yellow  Book,   xix,    324  ;   as 

caricaturist  and  novelist,  323—324 
Belfast,  220 
Bell,  The,  and  the  Arrow  (Hopper),. 

452 
Bella  Donna  (Hichens),   395,   397, 

398 
Belloc,  Hilaire,  as  poet,   123-124; 

as  novelist  and  satirist,  410—411 
Beloved  Vagabond,  The  (Locke),  406- 
Below  Stairs  (Sidgwick),  449 
Below  the  Salt  (Robins),  434 
Benares,  305 
Bending  of  the  Bough,  The  (Moore), 

194,  196,  201 
Benedict  Kavanagh  (Birmingham), 

414 
Bennett,  Arnold,  as  dramatist,  267  ;. 

aa  novelist,   357,   358,   364-369; 

contrasted  with  Thomas  Hardy, 

368 
Benson,  Arthur,  C.,  as  poet,  108- 

110  ;   as  nature  poet,  127 
Benson,    Edward    F.,    as   novelist,. 

343-344 
Benson,  Robert  Hugh,  as  novelist, 

402-403 

Berri,  Duchesse  de,  445 
Bertrud  and  other  Dramatic  Poem& 

(Sackville),   150 


INDEX 


483 


Beside  the  Bonnie  Brier  Bush  (Mac- 

laren),  353 
Besier,  Rudolf,  as  dramatist,  269- 

270 

Beth  Book,  The  (Grand),  430 
Better  Dead  (Barrie),  350 
Betty  Musgrave  (Findlater),  354 
Bierce,  Ambrose,  as  novelist,  458, 

476-477 
Binyon,    Laurence,    contributes   to 

The  Yellow  Boole,  xviii ;  as  poet, 

73,     82—86 ;      comparison     with 

Stephen  Phillips,  86 
Bird-bride,A  (Marriott  Watson),  148 
Birmingham,     G.     A.     (Jamea     O. 

Hannay),  as  novelist,  414 
Birthright  (Murray),  219 
Black,  William,  as  novelist,  347 
Blake,    William,    Influence    of,    on 

W.  B.  Yeats,  167 
Blaze  of  Glory,  A  (Winter),  448 
Blindness  of  Dr.  Grey,  The  (Shee- 

han),  415 
Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon  (Browning), 

224 
Blunt,  Wilfrid  Scawen,  as  poet,  14- 

15 
Bob  Martin's  Little  Girl  (Murray), 

341 

Bob,  Son  of  Battle  (Ollivant),  407 
Boer  War,  The,  W.  E.  Henley  and, 

xxvii,  32 ;  Rudyard  Kipling  and, 

38,    39;     Richard   Le   Gallienne 

and,  107 

Bogland  Studies  (Barlow),  185 
Bonaventure  (Cable),  470 
Bondman,  The  (Caine),  342 
Book  Bills,   The,  of  Narcissus  (Le 

Gallienne),  108 

Book  of  Orm,  The  (Buchanan),  18 
Book     of     Saints     and      Wonders 

(Gregory),  202 

Book  of  Twenty  Songs  (Symons),  23 
Book  of  Verses  (Henley),  30 
Books,  the  torrent  of,  355 
Bootle's  Baby  (Winter),  448 
Born  in  Exile  (Gissing),  294,  297 
Borrow,  George,  11 
Boston,  459 

Bostonians,  The  (James),  459 
Bothwell  (Swinburne),  225 
Boyle,  William,  as  dramatist,  217 
Bracken  (Trevena),  380 
Braddon,  Mary  E.  (Mrs.  John  Max- 
well), as  novelist,  453 
Brand  (Ibsen),  81,  224 
Brangivyn  Mystery,   The  (Murray), 

341 


Brass  Bottle,  The  (Anstey),  345 
Brazenhead  the  Great  (Hewlett),  399 
Bred  in  the  Bone  (Page),  472 
Bridge  of  Fire,  The  (Flecker),  137 
Bridges,  Robert,  and  the  Victorian 

era,  4  ;    as  poet,  9-10 
Bridling  of  Pegasus,  The  (Austin),  8 
Broad  Church  Movement,  xii 
Bront..,  Charlotte,  274,  281 
Brontes,  The,  xi,  418,  437 
Brooke,  Rupert,  as  poet,  134-136 
Broom  Squire,  The  (Baring-Gould), 

333 
Brown,  George  Douglas,  as  novelist, 

353 

Brown;  Thomas  E.,  18,  158 
Browning,  Eliz.  Barrett,  15,  141 
Browning,    Robert,    and    the    Vic- 
torian   Age,    xi ;     as   dramatist, 
224 

Brutus  Ultor  (Field),  146 
Buchanan,  Robert,  18 
Building  Fund,  The  (Boyle),  217 
Bullen,  Frank  T.,  as  novelist,  393- 

394 

Bundle  of  Life,  A  (Hobbes),  442 
Buried  Alive  (Bennett),  366 
Burney,  Frances,  418 
Burning  Daylight  (London),  478 
Butler,   Samuel,   as  novelist,   308- 
312  ;    versatility,  308  ;    opinions, 
309  ;   and  Gilbert  Cannan,  381 
By  the  Ionian  Sea  (Gissing),  298 
By  What  Authority  ?  (Benson),  403 
Byronism,  xi,  xiii 

Cable,  George  W.,  as  novelist,  457,. 

470-471 

Caesar  and  Cleopatra  (Shaw),  244 
Caffyn,  Mrs.  K.,    Sec  "  Iota  " 
Cahier  Jaune,  Le  (Benson),  108 
Caine,  Sir  Hall,  as  novelist,  S42-34& 
Californians,  The  (Atherton),  478 
Call  of  the  Blood,    The   (Hichens), 

396,  397,  398 

Call  of  the  Wild,  The  (London),  478 
Callirrhoe  (Field),  146 
Campden  Wonder,  The  (Masefield), 

262 

Can  Such  Things  Be?  (Bierce),  477 
Canada,  331,  335,  423 
Canadian  Born  (Ward),  423 
Canavans,  The  (Gregorj'),  204 
Candida  (Shaw),  243,  247 
Cannan,  Gilbert,  as  dramatist,  261  : 

as  novelist,  381-384 
Canterville  Ghost,  The  (Wilde),  282 
Canute  the  Great  (Field),  146 


484 


INDEX 


Captain     Brassbound's     Conversion 

(Shaw),  244 

Captain  Margaret  (Masefield),  394 
Captain  Swift  (Chambers),  235 
Captains  Courageous  (Kipling),  305, 

307 

Caravaners,  The  (Amim),  445 
Card,  The  (Bennett),  365,  368 
Cardinal's  Snuff-box,  The  (Har- 

land),  320 

Carissima,  The  (Malet),  440 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  xviii,  25 ;  Teuton- 
ism  of,  155 

Carnival  (Mackenzie),  387 
Carton,    Richard    C.    (R.    D.    Crit- 

chett),  as  dramatist,  236 
Case     of    Rebellious     Susan,     The 

(Jones),  233 
Case   of    Richard     Meynell,      The 

(Ward),  424,  476 
Cashel  Byron's  Profession  (Shaw), 

327 
Cassilis  Engagement,  The  (Hankin), 

253 

Caste  (Robertson),  226 
Catherine  Furze  (Rutherford),  314 
Cathleen  ni  Houlihan  (Yeats),  197, 

198 

Catholicism,  Irish,  183  ;  and  litera- 
ture, 286 
Celestial    Omnibus,    The    (Forster), 

384 

Celtic  ideals,  xviii 
Celtic    literary    revival,    The,   xiii, 
xxix,  157  seqq.;  W.  B.  Yeats  and, 
163 
Celtic  mysticism  of  William  Sharp, 

50 

Celtic  poetry,  184 
Celtic  Twilight,  The  (Yeats),  165 
Cenci,  The  (Shelley),  173,  224 
Centaur's  Booty,  The  (Moore),  122 
Chattoners,  The  (Benson),  344 
Chambers,     Charles     Haddon,     as 

dramatist,   235-236 
Chance  (Conrad),  389,  390 
Chance,  the  Idol  (Jones),  234 
Change  in  the  Cabinet,  A  (Belloc), 

411 

Charity  (Graham),  329 
Charity,  The,   that  Began  at  Home 

(Hankin),  253 

Charwoman's  Daughter,    The    (Ste- 
phens), 416 

Chastelard  (Swinburne),  225 
Cheap    Jack    Zita    (Baring-Gould), 

333 
Chesterton,    Gilbert    K.,    as    poet, 


124-126;      as    critic,     124;      ae 
novelist  and  journalist,  411-413 
Chicago,  475 

Child  of  Promise,  The  (Syrett),  450 
Child  of  the  Jago,  A  (Morrison),  387 
Children  of  Circumstance  (Iota),  433 
Children   of  the    Ghetto    (Zangwill), 

338,  339 
Children   of  the   Mist    (Phillpotte), 

374 
Children   of  the    Tempest   (Munro), 

349 

Choir  Invisible,  The  (Allen),  471 
Christ  in  Hades  (Phillips),  74,  75 
Christian,  The  (Caine),  343 
Christmas  Garland,  A  (Beerbohm), 

324 

Chronicles  of  Clovis,  The  (Saki),  413 
Churchill,     Winston,     as    novelist, 

475-476 

Cigarette  Maker's  Romance  (Craw- 
ford), 469 
City    of   Pleasure,    The    (Bennett), 

365,  366 

Clancy  Name,  The  (Robinson),  218 
Clare,  217 

Clare  Hopgood  (Rutherford),  314 
Classicism  in  European  literature, 

155 

Clayhanger  (Bennett),  367,  368 
Cleg  Kelly  (Crockett),  353 
Cleopatra  (Haggard),   332 
Clerkenwell,    296 
Clifford,  Ethel  (Mrs.  Fisher  Went- 

worth  Dilke),  as  poet,  151 
Clifford,  Mrs.   W.   K.,   as  novelist, 

448-449 

Cliffs,  The  (Doughty),  92,  94 
Clouds,  The  (Doughty),  94 
Clough,  Arthur  Hugh,  xii 
Cluster  of  Nuts,  A  (Tynan),  451 
Cockney  dialect,  387 
Coleridge,  Mary  E.,  as  poet,   147- 

148  ;    as  novelist,  444-445 
Collected  Poems  (A.  E.),  174 
Collected  Poems  (Shorter),  191 
Collected  Poems  (Woods),  17 
Collins,    J.    Churton,    on    Stephen 

Phillips,  77 

Colonel  Enderby's  Wife  (Malet),  439 
Colour  of  Life,  The  (Meynell),  16 
Colum,    Padraic,    xxix ;     as    poet, 

179  ;   as  dramatist,  217-218 
Combined  Maze,  The  (Sinclair),  436, 

437 

Come  and  Find  Me  !  (Robins),  435 
Coming  of  Love,  The  (Watts-Dun- 
ton),  11,  12,  313 


INDEX 


485 


Commentary,  A  (Galsworthy),  374 
Common  Lot,  The  (Herrick),  476 
Concerning  Isabel  Carnaby  (Fowler), 

445,  446 

Conder,  Charles,  xviii 
Confessions     of     a      Young     Man 

(Moore),  285,  287 
Conrad,  Joseph,   as  novelist,   387- 

393 
Conversion    of    Winckelmann,    The 

(Austin),  7,  8 
Convert,  The  (Robins),  435 
Cooper,  James  Fenimore,  486 
Copperhead,  The  (Frederic),  471 
Corelli,  Marie,  as  novelist,  276,  453- 

454 

Cornwall,  322,  333,  375 
Coryston  Family,  The  (Ward),  424, 

425 

Cosmopolitanism  in  literature,  456 
Couch,  Sir  A.  T.   Q.     See  Quiller- 

Couch. 

Counsel  of  Perfection,  A  (Malet),  439 
Countess  Cathleen,  The  (Yeats),  164 

166,  169,  171,  196 
Country  House,  The  (Galsworthy), 

371,  372 

Country  Muse,  A  (Gale),  111 
Country  of  the  Blind,  The  (Wells), 

360 

Court  Theatre,  The,  248,  262 
Cousin  Kate  (Davies),  269 
Cousins,  James  H.,  181 
Cowen,  Louis,  338 
Crackanthorpe,  Hubert,    xviii  ;    as 

novelist,  315-319,  432 
Craddock,    Charles    E.     (Mary    N. 

Murfree),  as  novelist,  458,  472 
Crawford,  F.,  Marion,  as  American, 

456,  468  ;    as  novelist,  468-470  ; 

books  on  Italian  history,  470 
Creators,  The  (Sinclair),  437 
Creel  of  Irish  Stories,  A  (Barlow), 

451 
Creoles  of  Louisiana,  The  (Cable), 

470 

Cricket  Songs  (Gale),  112 
Crisis,  The  (Churchill),  475 
Crock  of  Gold,  The  (Stephens),  180, 

415,  416 
Crockett,   Samuel  R.,   as  novelist, 

353 

Cromwell  and  Other  Poems  (Drink- 
water),  132 

Crossing,  The  (Churchill),  475 
Crossrigs  (Findlater),   354 
Crossroads,  The  (Robinson),  219 
Crucial  Instances  (Wharton),  479 


Cruise  of  the  Cachalot,  The  (Bullen), 
393 

Cuchulain  of  Muirthemne  (Gregory), 
202 

Cuckoo  Songs  (Tynan),  190 

Cumberland,  342 

Curious  Myths  of  the  Middle  Ages 
(Baring  Gould),  333 

Custom  of  the  Country,  The  (Whar- 
ton), 480 

Cynthia's  Way  (Sidgwick),  449 

Daffodil  Fields  (Masefield),  98,  99 
Daily  Bread  (Gibson),  96 
Daisy  Miller  (James),  459 
Damnation   of   Theron    Ware,    The 

(Frederic),  471 
Danae  (Moore),  122 
Dandy  Dick  (Pinero),  229 
Daniel  Deronda  (Eliot),  281 
Danny  (Ollivant),  408 
Dark  Flower,  The  (Galsworthy),  372 
Dark  Lantern,  A  (Robins),  435 
Dart  River,  376 
Dartmoor  novels,  374,  378 
Darwin      Among      the      Machines 

(Butler),  308 
Darwinian  theory,  xii 
Daughter  of  Heth,  A  (Black),  347 
Daughter  of  Strife,  A  (Findlater),  354 
Daughter  of  the  Fields,  A  (Tynan), 

451 

David  Elginbrod  (Macdonald),   347 
Davidson,  John,  contributor  to  The 

Yellow  Book,  xviii,  xix  ;  as  poet, 

25-30,  49  ;    early  career,  26  ;    as 

novelist,  26,  323 
Davies,  Hubert  H.,   as  dramatist, 

269 
Davies,  William  H.,  as  poet,   129- 

131 
Dawn  in  Britain,   The  (Doughty), 

90,  91,  92,  94,  120 
Days  and  Nights  (Symons),  20 
Days  of  Auld  Lang  Syne  (Maclaren), 

353 

Day's  Work,  The  (Kipling),  306 
Dead  Man's  Rock  (Quiller  Couch), 

330,  331 
Dear    Departed,    The    (Houghton), 

259 
Death    of   Adam,    The,    and    Other 

Poems  (Binyon),  85 
Death  of  Leander,  The  (Drinkwater), 

131 

Death's  Jest  (Beddoes)  Book,  224 
Deborah  (Abercrombie),  102 
Decay  of  Lying, The  (Wilde),  xvi,  xvii 


486 


INDEX 


Decorations  (Dowson),  47 
Deemster,  The  (Caine),  342 
Defoe,  Daniel,  275,  417 
Deirdre,  the  story  of,  69,  70 
Deirdre  (A.  E.),  199 
Deirdre  (Yeats),  164,  172,  202 
Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows  (Synge),  209, 

213,  214 

Deirdre  Wedded  (Trench),  69,  70 
De  la  Mare,  Walter,  as  poet,  133— 

134 

Deliverance,  A  (Monkhouse),  413 
Deliverance,  The  (Glasgow),  473 
De  Morgan,  William,  as  novelist, 

381,  385-386 
Demos  (Gissing),  296 
Denzil  Quarrier  (Gissing),  297 
Departmental  Ditties  (Kipling),  35 
Dervorgilla  (Gregory),  203 
Descent  of  Man,  The  (WTiarton),  479 
Descent      of     the      Duchess,      The 

(Roberts),  344 
De  Tabley,  Lord,  18 
Devil's  Disciple,  The  (Shaw),  244 
Devious  Ways  (Caiman),  382 
Devon,  333 
Dhoya  (Yeats),  165 
Dialect,  Dorset,  66  ;  Irish,  202,  213; 

Cumberland,  214  ;    Scotch,  352  ; 

in  fiction,  377  ;    Cockney,  387 
Diana  of  the  Crossways  (Meredith), 

xiv 

Diarmid  and  Orania  (Moore),  201 
Dickens,  Charles,  xi,  276,  356 
Dickens,  Charles  (Chesterton),  412; 

(Gissing),  298 
Dieppe,  21 

Dilemmas  (Harland),  321,  322 
Discords  (Egerton),  432 
Divine    Fire,    The    (Sinclair),    436, 

437 

Dr.  Sevier  (Cable),  470 
Doctor's  Dilemma,  The  (Shaw),  245 
Dodo  (Benson),  343 
Dodo  the  Second  (Benson),  344 
Dog  stories,  407 
Doll's  House,  A  (Ibsen),  211,  267, 

261 

Dolly  Dialogues  (Hope),  403 
Dome,  The,  xviii 
Don  (Besier),  270 
Don  Juan  (Byron),  14 
Don  Orsino  (Crawford),  469 
Donovan  Pasha  (Parker),  336 
Door  of  Humility,  The  (Austin),  8 
Dorrie  (Tirebuck),  340 
Dostoievsky,  Feodor,  276 
Double  Thread,  A  (Fowler),  446 


Doughty,  Charles  M.,  as  poet,  90-94 
Douglas,       George.      See      Brown, 

George  D. 
Douglas,      James,      and      Stephen 

Phillips,  74 
Dowson,   Ernest,   and    The    Yellow 

Book,  xviii,  xx  ;   his  life,  45  ;   as 

poet,  40,  46-49  ;  as  novelist,  315, 

319,  321-322 
Doyle,      Sir     Arthur     Conan,      as 

novelist,  333-335 
Drake  (Noyes),  120,  121 
Drama,  The,  and  literature,  223  ; 

poetic,   224  ;    H.  A.  Jones  and, 

232,  234  ;   Irish,  194-196 
Drama  in  Muslin,  A  (Moore),  288 
Dream,     The,     and     the     Business 

(Hobbes),  443 

Dream  Come  True  (Binyon),  85 
Dream  Life  and  Real  Life  (Schrei- 

ner),  428 

Dream  of  Daffodils,  A  (Lowry),  117 
Dreamers  of  the  Ghetto   (Zangwill), 

338 

Dreams  (Schreiner),  428 
Drinkwater,  John,  as  poet,  131-133 
Dublin,    183,    193,    195.      See   also 

Irish  Literary  Theatre 
Duchess  of  Malfi,  The,  210 
Dumas,  Alexandre,  275 
Dweller     on     the     Threshold,     The 

(Hichens),  387,  398 
Dying  Fires  (Monkhouse),  413 
Dynasts,  The  (Hardy),  56,  57,  58, 

59,  91,  92,  94 

Earth's  Voices  (Sharp),  49 
Earthwork  out  of  Tuscany  (Hewlett), 

399 

East,  Poems  of  the,  143 
Easter  Vacation,  An  (O'Neill),  187 
Ebb-tide,  The  (Stevenson),  352,  356 
Edgeworth,  Maria,  275,  418 
Edinburgh  Infirmary,  W.  E.  Henley 

and,  30,  34 
"  Egerton,   George,"   contributions 

to   The   Yellow  Book,  xviii,  xix, 

315;  as  novelist,  432-433 
"  Eglinton,  John  "  (W.  K.  Magee), 

181 

El  Ombu  (Hudson),  329 
Eldest  Son,  The  (Galsworthy),  266 
Elf -errant,  The  (O'Neill),  187 
Eliot,  George,  xi,  276,  281,  418,  425, 

437,  451 
"  Elizabeth  "  ( Countess  von  Arnim), 

as  novelist,  445 
Elizabeth  (Ritchie),  447 


INDEX 


487 


Elizabeth  and  Her  German  Garden 

(Arnim),  445 

Elizabeth  Cooper  (Moore),  201 
Elizabeth's    Adventures    in    Riigen 

(Arnim),  445 
Ellis,  Havelock,  xx 
Eloquent  Dempsey,  The  (Boyle),  217 
Elsket  (Page),  472 
Emblems    of    Love    (Abercrombie), 

101 

Emmanuel  Burden  (Belloc),  411 
Emotional  Moments  (Grand),  430 
Enchanted  Island,  The  (Noyes),  120   ; 
Enchanted  Sea,   The  (Martyn),  200 
Encyclopaedia    Britannica,    Watta- 

Dunton's  contributions,   11 
England  and  OtJier  Poems  (Binyon),    i 

85,  86 

England's  Darling  (Austin),  6 
English  drama,  223 
English  Poems  (Le  Gallienne),  106 
English  Poets  (Ward),  421 
Englishman,     An,     Looks     at     the 

World  (Wells),   359 
Englishwoman's    Love    Letters,    An 

(Housman),  104,  324,  325,  433 
Epic  of  Hades  (Morris),  18 
Epigrams  of  Art,  Life,  and  Nature 

(Watson),  41 

Erectheus  (Swinburne),  xiv 
Eremus  (Phillips),  73,  74,  82,  86 
Erewhon  (Butler),  308,  310,  311 
Erewhon    Revisited    (Butler),     310, 

311,  312 

Eros  and  Psyche  (Bridges),  9 
Ervine,  St.  John,  as  dramatist,  220 
Esmond,  Henry  Vernon  (Henry  V. 

Jack),  as  dramatist,  236 
Essay  on  Shelley  (Thompson),  51 
Essays   on  Life,   Art,    and  Science  \ 

(Butler),  310 

Esther  Vanhomrigh  (Woods),  447 
Esther    Waters    (Moore),    201,    284, 

285,  288,  289,  293,  375 
Eternal  City,  The  (Caine),  343 
European  literature,  155 
Eve  of  St.  Mark  (Keats),  150 
Evelyn  Innes  (Moore),  200,  284,  289, 

293 
Everlasting  Mercy,  The  (Masefield), 

98,  99,  100 
Exploits  of  Brigadier  Gerard  (Doyle), 

334 

Fabian  Society,  The,  and  G.  Ber-   i 
nard  Shaw,  238,  246,  327  ;    and 
Sidney  Webb,  239  ;    and  H.  G. 
Wells,  359 


Fair  Rosamund  (Field),  146 
Faith  (Graham),  329 
Fallen  Idol,  A  (Anstey),  345 
Falstaff,  277 

Family  Failings  (Boyle),  217 
Fancy's  Following  (Coleridge),  147 
Fancy's  Guerdon  (Coleridge),  147 
Fanny's  First  Play  (Shaw),  245 
Fantasias   (Egerton),    432 
Fareiuell  to  Poesy  (Davies),  130 
Farringdons,  The  (Fowler),  446 
Father  Felix's  Chronicles  (Hopper), 

452 

Father's  Tragedy,  The  (Field),  145 
Felix  (Hichens),  396,  398 
Fenwick's  Career  (Ward),  425 
Fiction,  works  of.     See  Novels. 
Fiddler's  House,  The  (Colum),  210, 

218 
Field,   Michael  (Miss  Bradley   and 

Miss  Cooper),  as  poets,  145-147 
Fielding,  Henry,  275 
Fiery  Dawn,  The  (Coleridge),  444 
Findlater,  Jane  H.,  as  novelist,  354 
Findlater,  Mary,  as  novelist,  354 
Finer  Grain,  The  (James),  459,  462 
Firdausi  in  Exile  (Gosse),  14 
Fire-seeker,  The  (Iota),  434 
Fires  (Gibson),  96,  97 
First  Men  in  the  Moon,  The  (Wells), 

36 

Five  Nations,  The  (Kipling),  38 
"  Five  Towns,  The,"  358,  365,  366 
Flames  (Hichens),  396,  397,  398 
Flaubert,  Gustave,   274  ;    and  Ar- 
nold Bennett,  365,  366 
Flaws  (Barlow),  451 
Flecker,  James  Elroy,  as  poet,  136- 

139 

Fleet  Street  and  Other  Poems  (David- 
son), 27,  28 

Fleet  Street  Eclogues  (Davidson),  26 
Flies  in  Amber  (Egerton),  433 
Flower  of  Old  Japan,  The  (Noyes), 

118,  119,  121 

Flowers  of  Passion  (Moore),  287 
Flute  of  Pan  (Hobbes),  444 
Foliage  (Davies),  130 
Folly  of  Eustace,  The  (Hichens),  396 
Food  of  the  Gods,  The  (Wells),  361 
Fool  Errant,  The  (Hewlett),  399 
Fool  of  the  World,  The  (Symons), 

23 

Fool's  Paradise,  A  (Grundy),  236 
For  England's  Sake  (Henley),  30,  32 
Forest  Lovers,  The  (Hewlett),  399 
Forest  of  Wild  Thyme,  The  (Noyes), 
118,  119 


488 


INDEX 


Forest  on  the  Hill,  The  (Phillpotts), 

376 
Forster,   E.   M.,   as  novelist,   384- 

385 

Fort  Amity  (Quiller-Couch),  331 
Fortunate  Youth,  The  (Locke),  407 
Fortunatua,  The  Pessimist  (Austin), 

6,  7 

Forty  Singing  Seamen  (Noyes),  120 
Forty-two  Poems  (Flecker),   137 
Four  Men,  The  (Belloc),   124 
Fowey,  331 
Fowler,   Ellen  Thorney croft  (Hon. 

Mrs.  A.  Felkin),  as  novelist,  445- 

447 

Fraternity  (Galsworthy),  372 
Frederic,  Harold,  as  novelist,  471- 

472 
Freeman,  Mrs.     See  Wilkins,  Mary- 

E. 

French  ideals,  xviii 
French  novel,  The,  273-274 
French    Revolution,    Influence    of, 

275 
From  the  Hills  of  Dream  (Sharp), 

49,  50 
From    the    Land    of   the    Shamrock 

(Barlow),  451 
Fruit  of  the  Tree,  The  (Wharton), 

480 
Fruitful  Vine,  The  (Hichens),  397- 

398 

Fuel  of  Fire  (Fowler),  446 
Fugitive,  The  (Galsworthy),  257 
Fullerton,      Morton,      on      Henry 

James,  460 
Further    Experiences    of    an    Irish 

R.M.  (Somerville  and  Ross),  452 
Furze  the  Cruel  (Trevena),  378,  379, 

380 


Gaelic  League,  xxix,  164,  196 

Gaelic  mysticism,  347 

Gale,  Norman  R.,  as  poet,  111-112  ; 

as  nature  poet,  127 
Galsworthv,    John,    as    dramatist, 

225,     250,     253,-259,     373  ;      as 

novelist,  276,  369-374 
Galway,  217,  219 
Gaol  Gate,  The  (Gregory),  205 
Garden  of  Allah,  The  (Hichens),  396, 

397,  398 
Garden  of  Kama,  The  (Hope),  143, 

145 
Gateless  Barrier,  The  (Malet),  440, 

441 
Gautier,  Theophile,  273 


Gay  Lord  Quex,  The  (Pinero),  231 
Gazelles,     The,     and    Other    Poems 

(Moore),  122 

Gentleman,  The  (Ollivant),  409 
George  Mandeville's  Husband 

(Robins),  434 
German    literature,     Carlyle     and, 

xviii 
Getting  Married  (Shaw),   245,   247, 

326 

Ghetto  Comedies  (Zangwill),  338 
Ghetto  Tragedies  (Zangwill),  338 
Giant's  Robe,  The  (Anstey),  344 
Gibson,  Wilfrid  Wilson,  as  poet, 

95-97,  100 

Gilian  the  Dreamer  (Munro),  349 
Gipsy  life,  Watts-Dunton  and,  1 1 
Gissing,  George  R.,  as  novelist,  284, 

294-299  ;    his  life,  294-296 
Gladstone,  W.  E.,  and  Robert  Els- 
mere,  422 

Glasgow,  Ellen,  as  novelist,  473 
Glenanaar  (Sheehan),  415 
Glimpse,  The  (Bennett),  366 
Gloria  Mundi  (Frederic),  471 
Glory    of    Clementina     Wing,     The 

(Locke),  407 

Goblin  Market  (Rossetti),  104 
God  in  the  Car,  The  (Hope)),  404 
Gods  and  Fighting  Men  (Gregory), 

202 

God's  Good  Man  (Corelli),  454 
Gods,  The,  Some  Mortals  and  Lord 

Wickenham  (Hobbes),  442,  443 
Godwin,  William,  275 
Golden  Age,  The  (Grahame),  303 
Golden  Bowl  The  (James),  460,  462, 

464,  466 

Golden  Helm,  The  (Gibson),  95 
Golden  Journey,  The,  to  Samarkand 

(Flecker),  137,  138 
Golden  Treasury  (Palgrave),  330 
Goldsmith,   Oliver,   233 
Good  Comrade,  The  (Silberrad),  450 
Gore-Booth,  Eva,  50  ;  as  poet,  187— 

188 
Gospel  of  Freedom,   The  (Herrick), 

476 
Gosse,   Edmund   W.,   4 ;     as  poet, 

13-14 
Graham,  Robert  B.,  Cunninghame, 

as  novelist,  328-329 
i   Grahame,  Kenneth,  xviii,  303 
Grand,    Sarah    (Mrs.    Frances    E. 

M'Fall),  as  novelist,  429-431 
i   Grand  Babylon  Hotel  (Bennett),  366 
;   Grand  Banks,  The,  305 
!   Grandissimes,  The  (Cable),  470 


INDEX 


489 


Grangecolinan  (Martyn),  200 
Orania  (Gregory),  203,  204,  205 
Granite  (Trevena),  378,  379 
Grass  of  Parnassus  (Lang),  13 
Great    Adventure,     The    (Bennett), 

267,  366 

Great  Boer  War.  The  (Doyle),  334 
Great  Catherine  (Shaw),  245 
Great  Friends  (Street),  410 
Greater  Inclination,  The  (Wharton), 

479 

Greatest  of  These,  The  (Grundy),  235 
Green,  J.  R.,  422 
Green,  T.  H.,  422 
Green  Arras  (Housman),  105,  326 
Green    Carnation,    The    (Hichens), 

395,  398 
Green    Graves,    The,    of    Balgowrie 

(Findlater),  354 
Green    Helmet,    The    (Yeats),    166, 

169,  172 
Gregory,     Lady,     and     the     Irish 

Literary      Theatre,       196 ;        as 

dramatist,  202-206 
Grey  Roses  (Harland),  320 
Griselda  (Blunt),  14 
Growth  of  Love,  The  (Bridges),  9 
Grundy,  Sydney,  as  dramatist,  "35 
Guest's,  Lady,  Mabinogion,  158 
Gustav  III  of  Sweden,  445 
Gwynn,  Stephen,  as  novelist,  414 

Haggard,  Sir  H.  Rider,  as  writer 
and  novelist,  332 

Hail  and  Farewell  (Moore),  201,  286, 
287,  292,  293 

Half  an  Hour  (Barrie),  266 

Half-way  House  (Hewlett),  399,  401 

Handsome  Brandons,  The  (Tynan), 
451 

Hankin,  St.  John,  as  dramatist, 
250-253 

Hannay,  Rev.  James  O.  See  Bir- 
mingham, G.  A. 

Hardy,  Thos.,  xi  ;  as  poet,  4,  55- 
66  ;  as  novelist,  59,  66,  276,  282, 
473  ;  as  a  metrist,  63  ;  Arnold 
Bennett,  contrasted  with,  368 ; 
Wessex  novels,  374,  375  ;  narrow- 
ness of  range,  460 

Harland,  Henry,  and  The  Yellow 
Book,  xviii,  xix;  as  novelist,  315, 
319-321  ;  Editor  of  the  Yellow 
Book,  319  ;  as  American,  458 

Harraden,  Beatrice,  as  novelist, 
438-439 

Harte,  Bret,  457 

Harvest  (Robinson),  219 


Hastings,  Basil  M.,  as  dramatist^ 
270 

Hauptmann's  Die  Weber,  193 

Hawthorn  and  Lavender  (Henley), 
30,  31 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  456 

Haydon,  Benjamin  R.,  425 

Hazard  of  New  Fortunes,  A 
(Howells),  467 

Heart  and  Sword  (Winter),  448 

Heather  (Trevena),  379 

Heather  .Field,  The  (Martyn),  196, 
199 

Heavenly  Twins,  The  (Grand),  429, 

430 

S  Helbeck  of  Bannisdale  (Ward),  424 
!  Helen  of  Troy  (Lang),  13 
I  Helen  Redeemed  (Hewlett),  89 
j  Henley,  Wm.  Ernest,  Influence  of, 
xiii,  xxvi ;  as  editor,  xxvii ;  com- 
pared with  Chas.  Kingsley,  xxviii ; 
characteristics,  xxviii  ;    as  poet, 
30-34 

Henry,  O.,  458 

Henry  Dunbar  (Braddon),  453 

Here  are  Ladies  (Stephens),  416 

Heretics  (Chesterton),  412 

Hero  Lays  (Milligan),  188 

Herod  (Phillips),  78,  79 

Herrick,  Prof.  Robert,  as  novelist^ 
476 

Herself  (Sidgwick),  450 

Hetty  Wesley  (Quiller-Couch),  331 

Hewlett,  Maurice,  as  poet,  87-90  ; 
as  novelist,  398-402 

Hichens,  Robert  S.,  as  novelist, 
395-398 

Hilda  Lessways  (Bennett),  367,  368 

Hilda  Stratford  (Harraden),  438 

Hildris  the  Queen  (Sackville),  149 

Hill  of  Vision,  The  (Stephens),  179, 
415 

HindU  Wakes  (Houghton),  256, 
257,  260,  261 

His  House  in  Order  (Pinero),  231 

His  People  (Graham),  329 

History  of  David  Grieve,  The 
(Ward),  419,  423,  424 

History  of  Sir  Richard  Calmady, 
The  (Malet),  440 

Hobbes,  John  Oliver  (Mrs.  P.  M.  T. 
Craigie),  as  novelist,  441—444 ; 
as  dramatist,  443-444 

Hocken  and  Huncken  (Quiller- 
Couch),  331 

Holcroft,  Thomas,  275 

Holiday  and  Other  Poems  (David- 
son), 27,  29 


490 


INDEX 


Homeward  (A.  E.),  174 

Honey,  My  Honey  (Tynan),  451 

Hope,   Anthony  (A.  H.  Hawkins) 

as  novelist,  403-405 
Hope,  Laurence  (Mrs.  A.  F.  Nichol- 
son), as  poet,  142-145,  147 
Hope  (Graham),  329 
Hopper,    Nora    (Mrs.    Wilfrid    H. 

Chesson),  as  poet,   188-190  ;    as 

novelist,  452 

Horniman,  Miss,  196,  259 
Houghton,    Stanley,   as  dramatist, 

259-261 
Hound     of    the    Baskervilles,     The 

(Doyle),  334 
Houp-la  (Winter),  448 
Hour-glass,  The  (Yeats),  197,  198 
House  of  Mirth,  The  (Wharton),  480 
House     with     the     Green     Shutters 

(Douglas),  353,  379 
Housman,   A.   E.,   as  poet,   67-69, 

100  ;   as  nature  poet,  127 
Housman,  Laurence,  as  poet,  104- 

106 ;     as    illustrator,    104 ;     and 

The   Yellow  Book,  xviii,  324  ;  as 

novelist,  324-326 
How    He    Lied    to    Her    Husband 

(Shaw),  224 

Howard's  End  (Forster),  385 
Howells,     William    D.f     a    typical 

American,  456  ;   as  novelist,  467- 

468 
Hudson,  William  Henry,  as  novelist, 

329-330  ;  his  other  books,  330 
Hugo,  Victor,  275 
Hugo  (Bennett),  365,  366 
Human   Inheritance,    The    (Sharp), 

49 

Humble  Romance,  A  (Wilkins),  472 
Hundred  Windows,  The(Lowry),  117 
Huysmans,  J.  K.,  283 
Hyacinth  Halvey  (Gregory),  204 
Hyde,  Dr.  Douglas,  and  older  Irish 

literature,   xxix,    176,   202,   163  ; 

as  poet,  176 
Hymn  of  Bardaisan,  41 
Hymn  to  Dionysus,  A   (Sackville), 

150 
Hyperion  (Keats),  83,  85 

/  Forbid  the  Banns  (Moore),  343 
Ibsen,  Henrik,  staged  in  London, 
193  ;  and  intellectual  drama,  81, 
211,  224  ;  influence  on  English 
drama,  228,  230,  233,  235,  237, 
248,  253,  258  ;  as  dramatist, 
237  ;  G.  B.  Shaw  and,  240,  241  ; 
naturalism  and  poetry,  254 


Ideal  Husband,  An  (Wilde),  227 

Ideala  (Grand),  429 

Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil  (Yeats),  165, 

166 

Idiom  in  literature,  214 
Idle  Ideas  (Jerome),  345 
Idle  Thoughts  of  an  Idle  Fellow 

(Jerome),  345 
Idler,  The  (Chambers),  235 
Idols  (Locke),  405 
Illumination  (Frederic),  471,  472 
Image,  The  (Gregory),  204 
Images  of  Good  and  Evil  (SjTnons), 

23,  24 
Imaginative    Man,    An    (Hichens), 

396 

Immaturity  (Shaw),  326 
Importance  of  Being  Earnest,  The 

(Wilde),  227 
Impressions  and  Opinions  (Moore), 

292 

In  a  Garden  (Beeching),  110 
In  a  Music  Hall  and  Other  Poems 

(Davidson),  26 

In  Black  and  While  (Kipling),  301 
In  Kedar's  Tents  (Merriman),  337 
In  Memoriam  (Tennyson),  xii 
In  Ole  Virginia  (Page),  472 
In  Russet  and  Silver  (Gosse),  14 
In  the  Midst  of  Life  (Bierce),  477 
In  the  Seven   Woods  (Yeats),    166, 

169 
In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen  (Synge), 

206,  208,  216 
In  the  Tennessee  Mountains  (Crad- 

dock),  472 

In  the  Year  of  Jubilee  (Gissing),  298 
In  Vinculis  (Blunt),  14 
In  Wicklow  (Synge),  207 
Inchbald,  Mrs.,  275 
Increasing  Purpose,  The  (Allen),  471 
Independent  Means  (Houghton),  259 
Independent    Theatre    and    Ibsen, 

228 
India,    Rudyard    Kipling    and,    34 

seqq.,  305  ;    Laurence  Hope  and, 

143 

Indian  Love  (Hope),  143 
Indiscretion  of  the  DucJiess,  The 

(Hope),  404 

Infidel,  The  (Braddon),  453 
Inner  Shrine,  The  (Sidgwick),  449 
Inside  of  the  Cup,  The  (Churchill), 

476 

Insurrections  (Stephens),  179,  416 
Intellectualism  in  drama,  210 
Interludes      and       Poems      (Aber- 

crombie),  101 


INDEX 


491 


International  Episode,  An  (James), 

459 

Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Brown- 
ing (Symons),  xxii 
Intrusions  of  Peggy,  The  (Hope),  404 
Invisible  Man,  The  (Wells),  360 
"  Iota  "  (Mra.  Kathleen  Caffyn),  as 

novelist,  433-434 
Ireland,  The  Celtic  Revival  in.    See 

Celtic 
Ireland  with  Other  Poems  (Johnson), 

177 

Iris  (Pinero),  231 
Irish  drama,  160,  193-196 
Irish  Folk-history  Plays  (Gregory), 

204 

Irish  Idylls  (Barlow),  451 
Irish  literary  movement,  xiii,  xxviii, 

xxix ;     George   Moore    and  the, 

284,  286 

Irish  Literary  Society,  164 
Irish  Literary  Theatre,  160, 163, 164, 

169,    173,    193-196  ;     dramatists 

of  the,  197  seqq.,  202,  220 
Irish  mysticism,  183 
Irish  National  Theatre  Society,  196 
Irish  novel,  The,  159,  160,  414 
Irish  novelists  (women),  451  seqq. 
Irish  peasant  speech,  202,  213 
Irish  poetesses,  183 
Irish  poetry,  161 
Irish  poets,  158  seqq.,  180 
Irishman,  The  stage,  160 
Irrational  Knot,  The  (Shaw),  326 
Irving,  Sir  Henry,  226 
Irving,  Washington,  456,  457 
Ishmael  (Braddon),  453 
Island  of  Dr.  Moreau,  The  (Wells), 

361 
Island  Pharisees,  The  (Galsworthy), 

370,  371 

Island  Race,  The  (Newbolt),  113 
It  Never  Can  Happen  Again  (De 

Morgan),  386 
Italy,  Marion  Crawford  and,   469, 

470 

Jacobs,  William  W.,  as  humorist, 

345-346 

Jack  Straw  (Maugham),  268 
Jackdaw,  The  (Gregory),  205 
James,  Henry,  contributor  to  The 
Yellow     Book,     xviii,     xix ;     as 
novelist,  248,  389,  458-467;    on 
Hubert  Crackanthorpe,  316  ;    as 
American,  456,  458 
James,  Mr.  Scott,  on  Henry  James, 
462 


Jane  Clegg  (Ervine),  220 
Jane  Eyre  (Bronte),  274 
Jean-Christophe  (Rolland),   450 
Jerome,  Jerome  K.,  as  writer  and 

humorist,  345 
Jess  (Haggard),  332 
Jessamy  Bride,  The  (Moore),  343 
Jews  in  London,  338 
Jim  Davis  (Masefield),  394 
Jimmyjohn  Boss  (Wister),  473 
Joan  Haste  (Haggard),  332 
John   Bull's   Other  Island   (Shaw), 

160,  245,  247,  256 
John  Herring  (Baring-Gould),   33 
John  Inglesant  (Shorthouse),  324 
John  of  Jingalo  (Housman),  325 
John  Sherman  (Yeats),  165 
John  Splendid  (Munro),  349 
Johnson,     Lionel     P.,     xviii ;     on 

Thomas  Hardy,  56,  178  ;  as  poet, 

177-178 
Jones,  Henry  Arthur,  as  dramatist, 

232-235 

Joseph  Entangled  (Jones),  234 
Joseph    Vance    (De    Morgan),    385, 

386 

Journal  Intime  (Amiel),  421 
Joy  (Galsworthy),  257 
Joyous  Adventures  of  Aristide  Pujol, 

The  (Locke),  407 
Judah  (Jones),  233 
Jude  the  Obscure  (Hardy),  379 
Judgment  House,  The  (Parker),  336 
Jump  to  Glory  Jane  (Meredith),  104 
June  Romance,  A  (Gale),  112 
Jungle,  The  (Sinclair),  457,  475 
Jungle  Books,  The  (Kipling),  305 
Just  So  Stories  (Kipling),  306 
Justice  (Galsworthy),  255,  256,  257, 

258 

"  Kailyard  School,  The,"  349 
Karamanian  Exile,  The  (Mangan), 

161 
Katharine     Fensham      (Harraden), 

438 

Keats,  John,  and  Francis  Thomp- 
son compared,  52 
Kentucky,  471,  475 
Kentucky  Cardinal,  A  (Allen),  471 
Keohler,  Thomas,  as  poet,  181 
Kerrigan's  Quality  (Barlow),  451 
Kidnapped  (Stevenson),  349 
"  Kiltartan  English,"  202-203 
Kim  (Kipling),  305,  306,  307 
Kincora  (Gregory),  203 
King,  The  (Phillips),  80,  81 
King  Bitty  of  Ballarat  (Roberts),  344 


492 


INDEX 


King  Solomon's  Mines  (Haggard), 
332 

King  With  Two  Faces,  The  (Cole- 
ridge), 444 

King's  Revoke,  The  (Woods),  447 

King's  Threshold,  The  (Yeats),  172 

Kingsley,  Charles,  xxviii 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  as  poet,  34—40  ; 
and  W.  E.  Henley,  xxvii,  and 
India,  34  :  realism,  284;  as 
novelist,  299-307  ;  Mulvaney 
stories,  301 

Kipps  (Wells),  361,  363,  364 

Kirriemuir  (Thrums),  351 

Kitty  Tailleur  (Sinclair),  436 

Klondyke,  435,  436,  478 

Knave  of  Hearts  (Symons),  24 

Lacrimce  Musarum  (Watson),  40,  42 
Ladder  of  Swords,  The  (Parker),  336 
Ladder  to  the  Stars,  The  (Findlater), 

354 
Lady    Audley's    Secret    (Braddon), 

453 

Lady  Baltimore  (Wister),  473 
Lady  Frederick  (Maugham),  268 
Lady  from  the  Sea,  The  (Ibsen),  254 
Lady  Huntworth's  Experiment  (Car- 
ton), 236 

Lady  of  the  Barge,  The  (Jacobs),  346 
Lady  of  the  Drawing-room  Floor,  The 

(Coleridge),  445 
Lady    Paramount,    The    (Harland), 

321 

Lady  Patricia  (Besier),  270 
Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (Ward),  425 
Lady    Windermere'a    Fan    (Wilde), 

224   227 
Lahore,  305 
Lake,  The  (Moore),  201,  284,  290, 

293 

Lalage's  Lovers  (Birmingham),  414 
Lalla  Rookh  (Moore),  143 
Lamb,  Lady  Caroline,  425 
Lamp,  The,  and  the  Lute  (Marriott 

Watson),  149 
Land,  The  (Colum),  217 
Land  of  Heart's  Desire,  The  (Yeats), 

164,  169,  170,  171 
Land  of  Promise,  The  (Maugham), 

268 
Lane,  The,  That  Had  No  Turning 

(Parker),  335 
Lang,  Andrew,  as  man  of  letters, 

12  ;    as  poet,  13 
Last  Ballad,  The  (Davidson),  27 
Last  of  the  De  MuUins,  The  (Han- 
kin),  252 


Last  Studies  (Crackanthorpe),   316 
Later  Poems  (Meynell),  16 
Lawton  Girl,  The  (Frederic),  471 
Le    Gallienne,    Richard,    as    poet, 

106-108;    as  novelist,  282 
Le  Gentleman  (Sidgwick),  450 
Leaves  of  Grass  (Whitman),  129 
Leonora  (Bennett),  366 
Lespinasse,  Mile.,  425 
Letters  from  America  (Brooke),  135 
Letty  (Pinero),  231 
Lever,  Charles,  160 
Liberty  Hall  (Carton),  236 
Life  and  Habit  (Butler),  308,  310 
Life  for  a  Life,  A  (Herrick),  476 
Life's  Atonement,  A  (Murray),  341 
Life's  Handicap  (Kipling),   305 
Light  Freights  (Jacobs),  346 
Light  of  Asia  (Edwin  Arnold),  18 
Light   that   Failed,    The    (Kipling), 

304,  305 

Likely  Story,  A  (De  Morgan),  386 
Lilith  (Macdonald),  347 
Listeners,  The  (de  la  Mare),  133,  341 
Literary  History  of  Ireland  (Hyde), 

176,  202 

Literature  and  Dogma  (Arnold),  422 
Little  Brother  (Cannan),  383,  384 
Little  Dinners  with  the  Sphinx  (Le 

Gallienne),  108 

Little  Dream,  The  (Galsworthy),  254 
Little  Mary  (Barrie),  266 
Little  Minister,   The  (Barrie),   265, 

350,  352 

Little  Novels  of  Italy  (Hewlett),  399 
Little  Peter  (Malet),  439 
Little    Vanities   of  Miss    Whittaker 

(Winter),  448 

Little  Widow,  The  (Tirebuck),  340 
Liverpool,  340 
Lives  of  the  Saints  (Baring-Gould), 

333 

Liza  of  Lambeth  (Maugham),  387 
Loaves  and  Fishes  (Maugham),  268 
Locke,  Wm.  John,  as  novelist,  405- 

407 

Log  of  a  Sea-waif,  The  (Bullen),  394 
London,    Jack,    458 ;     as   novelist, 

477-478 

London,  Henry  James  and,  460 
London  (weekly),  xxvii 
London   Nights    (Symons),    21,    24, 

322 
London    Visions   (Binyon),   84,   85, 

86 

Long  Ago  (Field),  146 
Longest  Journey,  The  (Forster),  384, 

385 


INDEX 


498 


Loom  of  Years,  The  (Noyes),  118 
Loot  of  Cities,  The  (Bennett),  366 
Lord  Arthur  Savile's  Crime  (Wilde), 

282 

Lord  Jim  (Conrad),  388,  389,  390 
Lord   Vyet  and  Other  Poems  (Ben- 
son), 109 

Lost  Endeavour  (Masefield),  394 
Lost  Pibroch,  The  (Munro),  348 
Lost  World,  The  (Doyle),  335 
Louise  de  Valliere  (Tynan),  190 
Love   and   Mr.    Lewisham    (Wells), 

361,  363,  364 
Love  and  the  Soul  Hunters  (Hobbes), 

443 
Love — And  What  Then  ?  (Hastings), 

270 

Love  in  a  Life  (Monkhouse),  413 
Love  in  Idleness  (Beeching),  110 
Love  Songs  of  Connacht  (Hyde),  176 
Love  Sonnets  of  Proteus  (Blunt),  15 
Love's  Journey  (Clifford),  151 
Love's     Looking-glass      (Beeching), 

110 

Love's  Pilgrimage  (Sinclair),  475 
Lowry,    Henry    Dawson,    as    poet, 
117-118  ;    as  novelist,  315,  319, 
322 

Lucas,  E.  V.,  as  novelist,  413 
Luke  Delmege  (Sheehan),  415 
Lying  Prophets  (Phillpotts),  374, 

375 

Lyrical  and  Other  Poems  (Drink- 
water),  131 

Lyrical  Poems  (Binyon),  84 
Lyrics  (Benson),  109 
Lyrics  (Woods),  17 
Lyrics  and  Dramas  (Phillips),  81,  82 
Lyrics       and      Narrative      Poems 

(Trench),  72 
Lys  Rouge,  Le  (France),  373 

Mabinogion  (Guest),  158 

MacCathmhaoil,  Seumas,  181 

Macdonald,  George,  50  ;  as  novel- 
ist, 347 

MacDonough's  Wife  (Gregory),  205 

Mackenzie,   Conipton,   387 

Maclaren,  Ian.  See  Watson,  John 
M. 

Macleod,  Fiona.  See  Sharp, 
William 

Macpherson's  Ossian,   158 

McTeague  (Norris),  474 

Madame  Bovary  (Flaubert),  274, 
290 

Madame  de  Treymes  (Wharton),  480 

Madame  Delphine  (Cable),  470 


Mademoiselle  Miss  (Harland),  319, 

320 

Madras  House,  The  (Barker),  249 
Maeterlinck,   M.,   Influence   of,   on 

W.  B.  Yeats,   166 
Magazine  of  Art,  xxvii 
Magistrate,  The  (Pinero),  229 
Magnetic,  North,  The  (Robins),  434 

435,  436 

Mainsail  Haul,  A  (Masefield),  394 
Maiwa's  Revenge  (Haggard),  332 
Major  Barbara  (Shaw),  245 
Make  Believe  (Lowry),  322 
Malcolm  (Macdonald),  347 
Malet,     Lucas     (Mrs.      St.      Leger 

Harrison),    as   novelist,    439-441 
Malory's  Morte  d' Arthur,  158 
Mammon  (Davidson),  28 
Mammon  and  Company   (Benson), 

344 

Man,  Isle  of,  342 
Man  and  Superman   (Shaw),   245, 

246 
Man  from  the  North,  A  (Bennett), 

366 

Man  of  Destiny  (Shaw),  243 
Man  of  Genius,  A  (Willcocks),  438 
Man  of  Honour,  A  (Maugham),  267, 

288 

Man  of  Mark,  A  (Hope),  403 
Man  of  Moods,  A  (Lowry),  322 
Man  of  Property,  The  (Galsworthy), 

370.  371 
Man,     The,     Who     was     Thursday 

(Chesterton),  412 
Manalive  (Chesterton),  412 
Manchester    Repertory    Company, 

259 
Mangan,  Jas.  C.,  as  an  Irish  poet, 

161 

Mankind  in  the  Making  (Wells),  359 
Mantle   of  Elijah,    The   (Zangwill), 

339 
Manual      of      English      Literature 

(Arnold),  421 

Manxman,  The  (Caine),  342 
Many  Cargoes  (Jacobs),  346 
Many  Inventions  (Kipling),  305 
Marcella  (Ward),  419,  424 
Margaret  Ogilvy  (Barrie),  350,  352 
|  Mariamne  (Moore),  122 
j  Marius  the  Epicurean  (Pater),  285 
Mark  Rutherford's  Deliverance,  314 
Marquis  of  Lossie,  The  (Macdonald), 

347 

Marriage  (Wells),  276,  362 
Marriage    of    William    Ashe,     The 

(Ward),  425 


494 


INDEX 


Marrying     of     Ann     Leete,      The 

(Barker),  248,  249 
Marty  (Winter),  448 
Martyn,  Edward,  and  the  Irish 

Literary      Theatre,       196 ;        as 

dramatist,   199-200 
Mary,  Queen  of  Scots,  399 
Mary     and     the     Bramble     (Aber- 

crombie),  101,  102 
Mary  Stuart  (Swinburne),  225 
Mary's  Wedding  (Houghton),  261 
Masefield,  John,  as  poet,  97-100  ; 

as      dramatist,      262-263 ;        as 

novelist,   394-395 
Masque  of  Dead  Florentines  (Hew- 
lett), 87 

Master,  The  (Zangwill),  339 
Master  Christian,  The  (Corelli),  454 
Maugham,  Wm.  Somerset,  as  dra- 
matist, 267-269 ;  as  novelist,  387 
Maupassant,  Guy  de,  274 
Maurice  Harte  (Murray),  219 
Mayne,   Rutherford,   as  dramatist, 

219 
Mayor  of  Casterbridge,  The  (Hardy), 

351 

Mea  Culpa  (Harland),  319 
Meg  of  the  Scarlet  Foot  (Tirebuck), 

340 

Mehalah  (Baring-Gould),  333 
Members   of  the   Family     (Wister) 

473 
Memoirs   of  an   American   Citizen, 

The  (Herrick),  476 
Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life  (Moore), 

286 
Memoirs       of      Sherlock       Holmes 

(Doyle),  334 

Mendicant  Rhymes  (Housman),  105 
Meredith,  George,  and  the  Victorian 

Era,  xi,  4 ;  characteristics,  xiii  ; 

poetry,     18;     as    novelist,    276, 

282  ;     and    Henry    James    com- 
pared, 463 

Merimee,  Prosper,  273 
Merriman,     Henry     Seton     (Hugh 

Stowell  Scott),  as  novelist,  336- 

337 

Mexico,  328 
Meynell,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Wilfrid,  and 

Francis  Thompson,  51 
Moynell,  Mrs.  Alice,  as  poet,  15—17, 

142 

Middleman,  The  (Jones),  233 
Middlemarch  (Eliot),   281 
Mighty  Atom,  The  (Corelli),  433,  454 
Miles  Dixcn  (Houghton),  261 
Milestones  (Bennett),  267 


Miller  of  Old  Church,  The  (Glas- 
gow), 473 

Milligan,  Alice,  as  poet,  188 
Mind  the  Paint  Qirl  (Pinero),  229 
Mineral  Workers  (Boyle),  217 
Miniatures  and  Moods  (Street),  410 
Miriam  Lucas  (Sheehan),  415 
Miriam's    Schooling    (Rutherford), 

314 

Miss  Bretherton  (Ward),  421 
Miss  Fallow  field"  a  Fortune  (Fowler), 

446 
Miss  Grace  of  All  Souls  (Tirebuck), 

339,  340 
Mr.  CluttcrbucVs  Election  (Belloc), 

411 

Mr.  Isaacs  (Crawford),  468 
Mr.  Preedy  and  the  Countess  (Car- 
ton), 236 
Mrs.  Dane's  Defence  (Jones),  233, 

234 

Mrs.  Dot  (Maugham),  268 
Mrs.  Dymond  (Ritchie),  447 
Mrs.  Elmsley  (Saki),  413 
Mrs.  Falchion  (Parker),  336 
Mrs.  Gorringe's  Necklace  (Davies) , 

269 

Mrs.  Keith's  Crime  (Clifford),  449 
Mrs.  Lancelot  (Hewlett),  399,  401 
Mrs.  Larimer  (Malet),  439 
Mrs.  Maxon  Protests  (Hope),  404 
Mrs.    Warren's  Profession   (Shaw), 

243,  247 

Mixed  Marriage  (Ervine),  220 
Mob  (Galsworthy),  257 
Mockers,  The  (Barlow),  185 
Modern  Antaeus,  A  (Housman),  325 
Modern    Chronicle,    A    (Churchill), 

475,  476 

Modern  Love  (Meredith),  23 
Modern  Lover,  A  (Moore),  287 
Modern  Painters  (Ruskin),  xv,  xvi 
Modern  Painting  (Moore),  285,  292 
Modern  Utopia,  A  (Wells),  359 
Modern  Way,  The  (Clifford),  449 
Maeve  (Martyn),  199 
Mollontrave  on  Women  (Sutro),  267 
Mollusc,  The  (Davies),  269 
Monkhouse,  Allan,  413 
Monologue,  The  dramatic,  62 
Moore,   F.   Frankfort,   as  novelist, 

343 

Moore,  George,  xviii ;  and  the  Irish 
Literary  Theatre,  194,  196;  as 
dramatist,  200-201  ;  as  novelist, 
284-294  ;  influence  of  Zola,  284, 
285  ;  of  Balzac,  285  ;  as  poet» 
287  ;  on  Henry  James,  465 


INDEX 


495 


Moore,  T.  Sturge,  as  poet,  121-123 
Moral,  The,  in  drama,  255 
Morals    of    Marcus    Ordeyne,    The 

(Locke),  405,  406 
Mordred  (Newbolt),  113 
More,  Hannah,  275 
More  Cricket  Songs  (Gale),  112 
Morris,  Sir  Lewis,  18 
Morrison,  Arthur,  as  novelist,  387 
Mort    de    Tintagiles,    La    (Maeter- 
linck), 166 

Morte  d' Arthur  (Malory),  158 
Morte  d"  Arthur  (Tennyson),   75 
Mother,  The  (Phillpotts),  376 
Motlis  (Ouida),  453 
Motley,  A  (Galsworthy),  374 
Mountain  Lovers,  The  (Sharp),  347 
Multitude  and  Solitude  (Masefield), 

394,  395 
Mummer's    Wife,   A    (Moore),   284, 

287,  288,  293,  317 
Munro,  Hector.     See  "  Saki  " 
Munro,  Neil,  158  ;   as  novelist,  348- 

349 
Murfree,  Mary  N.     See  Craddock, 

Chas.  E. 
Murray,  David  Christie,  as  novelist, 

341-342 

Murray,  T.  C.,  as  dramatist,  219 
Muse  in  Exile,  The  (Watson),  44 
My  Dark  Rosaleen  (Mangan),  161 
My  Ladies   Sonnets  (Le  Gallienne), 

106 

My  Lady  Nicotine  (Barrie),  350,  352 
My  New  Curate  (Sheehan),  415 
Myers,   Frederick,    18 
Mysticism,  183  ;   Irish,  183 

Napoleon  of  Netting  Hill,  The 
(Chesterton),  412 

Narrow  Viay,  A  (Findlater),  354 

National  (Irish)  Literary  Society, 
164 

National  Observer,  The,  W.  E. 
Henley  and,  xxvii,  35 

Nationality  in  literature,   155  seqq. 

Naturalist  in  La  Plata,  The  (Hud- 
son), 330 

Nature  and  Other  Poems  (Williams), 
128 

Nature  in  Downland  (Hudson),  330 

Nature  Poems  (Davies),  130 

Nature  poetry,  126-127 

Naulahka,  The  (Kipling  and  Bales- 
tier),  305 

Nero  (Phillips),  79 

Nest  of  Linnets,  A  (Moore),  343 

Nether  World,  The  (Gissing),  296 


Nets  of  Love,  The  (Gibson),  95 
New   Arabian  Nights    (Stevenson), 

25 

New  Ballads  (Davidson),  27 
New    Canterbury    Tales    (Hewlett), 

399 

New  Collected  Rhymes  (Lang),  13 
New  England,   472,   475,   479 
New  Grub  Street  (Gissing),  297 
New  Inferno,  The  (Phillips),  81,  82 
New  Irish  Comedies  (Gregory),  204 
New  June,  The  (Newbolt),  402 
New  Machiavelli,  The  (Wells),  276, 

362 

New  Man,  The  (Robins),  434 
New  Orleans,  470 
New  Poems  (Davies),   130 
—  —  (Gosse),  14 
•  (Le  Gallienne),  107 

-  (Phillips),  81 
(Thompson),  51 

—  (Trench),  72 
—  (Tynan),  190 

-  (Watson),  44 

New  Road,  The  (Munro),  349 
New  Sin,  The  (Hastings),  270 
New  Songs  (Colum),  179 
(Keohler),  181 

—  (Young),  188 

New  Worlds  for  Old  (Wells),  359 

New  York,  471 

Newbolt,  Sir  Henry  J.,  as  poet,. 
113-115;  as  novelist,  402-403 

Newman,  Cardinal,   420,   422 

Next  Religion,  The  (Zangwill),  338 

Nietzsche,  John  Davidson  and,  28. 

Nigger  of  the  Narcissus,  The  (Con- 
rad), 388 

191/f  and  Other  Poems  (Brooke), 
136 

No  Place  Like  Home  (Trevena),  380 

Non  Sequitur  (Coleridge),  444 

Norris,  Frank,  457  ;  as  novelist, 
473-475 

Northern  Lights  (Parker),  336 

Norway,  342 

Nostromo  (Conrad),  389 

Notorious  Mrs.  JEbbsmith,  The 
(Pinero),  230,  234 

Novel,  The  —  What  It  Is  (Craw- 
ford), 468 

Novel,  The.  Irish  novels,  159,  160  ; 
changes  in  the  last  half-century, 
273  ;  the  short  story,  273  ; 
French  fiction,  274,  275  ;  histori- 
cal romance,  275  ;  didactic,  275, 

276  ;       of       contemporary     life, 

277  ;     its   position,    278  ;     ephe- 


496 


INDEX 


meral  fiction,  278-279 ;  .the 
Victorian  novel,  281-282  ;  the 
testhetic  novel,  282  ;  real- 
ism, 284  ;  saleable,  341  ;  Scot- 
tish novels,  346  seqq.  ;  the 
"  Kailyard  School,"  349  ;  the 
flood  of  novels,  355  ;  twentieth 
century  development,  356 ;  en- 
during novels,  357  ;  realists  and 
romantics,  357  ;  romance,  387  ; 
as  written  by  novelists,  410 ; 
as  literary  form,  417  ;  women 
novelists,  417  seqq.  ;  divergence 
between  the  American  and  Euro- 
pean, 455  ;  the  short  story  in 
America,  457  ;  F.  Marion  Craw- 
ford on  the  novel,  468 
Noyes,  Alfred,  as  poet,  118-121 

Octopus,  The  (Norris),  457,  474 

Odd  Women,  The  (Gissing),  298 

Odes  (Binyon),  84,  85,  86 

Old  Country,  The  (Newbolt),  402 

Old  Creole  Days  (Cable),  470 

Old  Kensington  (Ritchie),  447 

Old  Mole  (Cannan),  383 

Old  Ships,  The  (Flecker),  139 

Old  Wives'  Tale,  The  (Bennett),  365, 

367,  368 

Ollivant,  Alfred,  as  novelist,  407-409 
On  Bailees  Strand  (Yeats),  172,  202 
On  March  (Winter),  448 
On     Money     and     Other     Matters 

(Street),  410 

On  the  Threshold  (Gibson),  96 
On  Viol  and  Flute  (Gosse),  13 
One,    The,    and    the    Many    (Gore- 
Booth),  50,  187,  188 
O'Neill,  Moira  (Mrs.  Skrine),  xxix  ; 

as  poet,  185-187 
Onions,  Oliver,  387 
Open  Country,  The  (Hewlett),  399, 

401 
Open  Question,  The  (Robins),  434, 

435 

Orchard  Songs  (Gale),   111,   112 
Origin  and  Development  of  Religious 

Beliefs  (Baring-Gould),  333 
Orinoco,  The,  330 
Orthodoxy    (Chesterton),    412 
Ossianic  poems,  158,  159 
O'Sullivan,  Seumas,  181 
Ouida    (Louise   de   la   Ramee),    as 

novelist,  453 

Our  Irish  Theatre  (Gregory),  202 
Ours   (Robertson),    226 
Out  of  the  Wreck  I  Rise  (Harraden), 

439 


Outcast  of  the  Islands,  An  (Conrad; 

388 

Outcry,  The  (James),  462,  466 
Over  Bemerton's  (Lucas),  413 
Over  the  Hills  (Findlater),  354 
Overman,  The  (Sinclair),  475 
Owd  Bob  (Ollivant),  407,  408 
Oxford  Book  of  English  Verse  (Quil- 

ler-Couch),   330 
Oxford  Movement,  xii 

Padua,  400 

Pagan  Poems  (Moore),  287 

Page,  Thomas  Nelson,  as  novelist, 

472-473 

Pageant,  The,  xviii 
Pain,  Barry,  387 

Pair  of  Spectacles,  A  (Grundy),  235 
Palmer,  John,  223 
Pampas,  The,  328 
Pan's  Prophecy  (Moore),  122,  123 
Paolo  and  Francesca,  The  story  of, 

77 
Paolo  and  Francesca  (Phillips),  76- 

78,  79,  80,  86 

Papers  from  a  Private  Diary  (Beech- 
ing),  111 

Parerga  (Sheehan),  415 
Paris  and  (Enone  (Binyon),   85 
Parker,    Sir    Gilbert,    and    W.    E. 

Henley,  xxvii;  as  novelist,  335- 

336 

Passers-by  (Chambers),  236 
Passionate  Friends,  The  (Wells),  362 
Pastime  Stories  (Page),  472 
Pater,  Walter,  xi,  xv  ;    as  critic  of 

art,  xvii;  and  Geo.  Moore,  285 
Path  to  Rome,  The  (Belloc),  124,  411 
Patmore,  Coventry,  xxiii 
Patrician,  The  (Galsworthy),  372 
Patriots  (Robinson),  219 
Paul  Kelver  (Jerome),  345 
Peace  and   Other  Poems   (Benson), 

109 

Peacock  Pie  (de  la  Mare),  133,  134 
Peer  Gynt  (Ibsen),  57,  81,  224 
Penelope  (Maugham),  268 
Penelope's       English      Experiences 

(Wiggin),  479 

Penny  Moneypenny  (Findlater),  354 
Penthesilea  (Binyon),  83 
People  and  Questions  (Street),  410 
Pcrfervid  (Davidson),  26,  323 
Perplexed    Husband,    The    (Sutro), 

267 

Persephone  (Binyon),  84 
Peter  Homunculus  (Cannan),  381 
Peter  Pan  (Barrie),  260 


INDEX 


497 


Petite  Oiseaux,  Lea  (Labiche),  235 
Phantasies   (Macdonald),   347 
Phantom  Rickshaw,  The  (Kipling), 

302 

Pharais  (Sharp),  347,  348 
Philanderer,  The  (Shaw),  243 
Phillips,  Stephen,  as  poet,  73-82  ; 

and  poetic  drama,   225 
Phillpotts,  Eden,  as  novelist,  374- 

378 

Pierre  and  His  People  (Parker),  335 
Pierrot  of  a  Minute,  The  (Dowson), 

47 

Pietro  of  Siena  (Phillips),  80,  86 
Pigeon,  The  (Galsworthy),  254 
Pinero,   Sir  Arthur  W.,  as  drama- 
tist, 228-232,  235 
Pit,  The  (Morris),  474 
Pixy  in  Petticoats,  A  (Trevena),  380 
Place  and  Power  (Fowler),  446 
Place-hunters,  The  (Martyn),  200 
Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills  (Kipling), 

300 
Playboy,  The,  of  the  Western  World 

(Synge),  207,  209,  211,  214 
Plays,  Acting  and  Music  (Symons), 

xxiv 

Plays  Pleasant  (Shaw),  243 
Plays  Unpleasant  (Shaw),  243 
Poe,  Edgar  Allan,  456,  457 
Poems  (Benson),  109 

—  (Binyon),  84 

—  (Brooke),  135 

—  (Coleridge),  148 

—  (de  la  Mare),  133 

—  (Drinkwater),  131 

—  (Gore-Booth),  187 

—  (Hope),  143 

—  (Johnson),  177 

—  (Meynell),  16 

—  (Noyes),  118,  120 

—  (Phillips),  75,  82,  86 

—  (Sackville),  150 

—  (Thompson),  51 

—  (Marriott  Watson),  148 

—  (Wilde),  4 

—  (Young),  188 

Poems  and  Ballads  (Quiller-Couch), 

113 

Poems  and  Ballads  (Swinburne),  6 
Poems  in  the  Dorset  Dialect  (Barnes), 

66 

Poems  in  Wiltshire  (Williams),  128 
Poems,  New  and  Old  (Newbolt),  115 
Poems,  New  and  Old  (Woods),  17 
Poems  of  Adoration  (Field),  146 
Poems  of  Love  and  Earth  (Drink  - 

water),  131,  132 

2  K 


Poems  of  Men  and  Hours  (Drink- 
water),  131 
Poems  of  the  Past  and  the  Present 

(Hardy),  56 

Poet-Laureate,  Office  of,  6 
Poetesses,   15,   141  ;    Irish,   183 
Poetry    and  Verse,  116  ;     contem- 
porary verse,   115  ;    of  man  and 
of  nature,  126 

Poetry  of  the  Period,  The  (Austin),  8 
Poets,    Dramatic,    76,    81  ;     major 

and  minor,  116 
Portrait  of  a  Lady,    The   (James), 

459,  462,  464,  465,  466 
Picture     of     Dorian     Gray,      The 

(Wilde),  xvi,  282,  283 
Portreeve,  The  (Phillpotts),  376 
Porphyrion    (Binyon),    83,    84,    85, 

86 

Positivism,  xii,  xiii 
Post  Liminium  (Johnson),    177 
Pot  of  Broth,  A  (Yeats),  197,  198 
Potteries,  The.    See  "  Five  Towns  " 
Power     Behind,     The     (Willcocks), 

438 

Praise  of  Life,  The  (Binyon),  84 
Pre-Raphaelitism,  "xii,  xiv 
Preludes  (Meynell),  15 
Premier,     The,     and     the     Painter 

(Zangwill),   338 
Primavera    (Phillips    and    Binyon), 

73,  83 

Prince  Lucifer  (Austin),  6,  7,  9 
Prince's  Quest,  The  (Watson),  41 
Princess  Casamassima  (James),  459 
Princess  Napraxine  (Ouida),  453 
Princess  Priscilld's   Fortnight   (Ar- 

nim),  445 
Prisoner  of  Zenda,  The  (Hope),  430, 

404 
Private  Papers   of  Henry  Ryecroft 

(Gissing),  289,  299 
Prodigal  Son,  The  (Caine),  343 
Professor,    The,    and    Other   Poems 

(Benson),  109 

Profligate,  The  (Pinero),  230 
Progress  (Graham),  329 
Prometheus  Unbound  (Shelley),  57, 

71 

Promise  (Sidgwick),  450 
Prose  Fancies  (Le  Gallienne),  108 
Provincial  and  Other  Papers  (Beech- 
ing),  111 

Provincialism  in  literature,  157 
Puck  of  Pook's  Hill  (Kipling),  306 
Purple    Land,    The,    that    England 

Lost  (Hudson),  330 
1   Pygmalion  (Shaw).   245 


498 


INDEX 


Quales  Ego  (Street),  410 
Quality  of  Mercy,  The  (Howolls),  467 
Quality  Street  (Barrie),  266 
Queen's  Fillet,  The  (Sheehan),  415 
Queen's  Quair,  The  (Hewlett),  399 
Queen's  Tragedy,  The  (Benson),  403 
Queen's  Vigil,  The  (Gibson),  95 
Quiller-Couch,  Sir  Arthur,  T.  (Q.), 
as   poet,    112-113;     as  novelist, 
330-332 ;     influence    of    R.    L. 
Stevenson,  330 
Quisante  (Hope),  404 

Bab  and  His  Friends  (Brown),  407 

Radziwill,  Princess,  428 

"  Raimond,  C.  E."  See  Robins, 
Elizabeth 

Ravenna  (Wilde),  4 

Realism  in  The  Yellow  Book,  xviii ; 
in  poetry,  94,  97 

Rebecca  of  Sunnybrook  Farm  (Wig- 
gin),  479 

Recollections  of  Roasetti  (Caine),  342 

Red  Hand  of  Ulster,  The  (Birming- 
ham), 414 

Red  Turf  (Mayne),  219 

Redcoat  Captain;  The  (Ollivant),  408 

Reef,  The  (Wharton),  480 

Regent,  The  (Bennett),  368 

Reginald  (Said),  413 

Reginald  in  Russia  (Saki),  413 

Religious  Songs  of  Connacht  (Hyde), 
176 

Repentance,  A  (Hobbes),  443 

Repentance  of  a  Private  Secretary, 
The  (Gwynn),  414 

Rest  Harrow  (Hewlett),  399,  401 

Resurrection  (Tolstoy),  256 

Resurrection  of  Peter,  The  (Radzi- 
will), 428 

'Reticence  in  Literature  '  (Waugh), 
xix 

Retrospective  Reviews  (Le  Gallienne), 
108 

Return  of  Sherlock  Holmes  (Doyle), 
334 

Return  of  the  Native  (Hardy),  376, 
397 

Return  of  the  Prodigal,  The  (Han- 
kin),  250,  253 

Revolution,  The,  in  Tanner's  Lane 
(Rutherford),  314 

Rhodes,  Cecil,  428 

Rhymes  a  la  Mode  (Lang),  13 

Rhythm  of  Life,  The  (Meynell),  16 

Richard  Carvel  (Churchill),  475 

Richard  Cceur  de  Lion,  399 

Richard  Yea-and-Nay  (Hewlett),  399 


Richardson,  Samuel,  275,  425 
Riders  to  the  Sea  (Synge),  207,  208, 

209,  213,  216 
Ridge,  W.  Pett,  387 
Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  The  (Howells), 

467,  468 
Ritchie,   Lady  A.   I.,    as  novelist, 

447 

River,  The  (Masefield),  98 
River,  The  (Phillpotts),  376 
Robert  Elsmere   (Ward),    419,   420, 

421,  422,  423,  424 
Robert  Falconer  (Macdonald),  347 
Robert  Louis   Stevenson  and   Other 

Poems  (Le  Gallienne),  107 
Robert  Orange  (Hobbes),  443 
Roberts,  Morley,  as  novelist,  344 
Robertson,  Thomas  W.,  as  drama- 
tist, 225-226 
Robins,  Elizabeth  (Mrs.  George  R. 

Parks),  as  novelist,  434-436 
Robinson,    Lennox,    as    dramatist, 

218-219 

Roderick  Hudson  (James),  459 
Rodin,  Auguste,  xxvii 
Rodney  Stone  (Doyle),  334 
Roman    Catholicism.      See    Catho- 
licism 
Romance  of  a  Plain  Man  (Glasgow), 

473 
Romance  of  Two    Worlds,  A   (Cor- 

elli),  454 
Romantic    Ballads    and    Poems    of 

Phantasy  (Sharp),  49 
Romantic  Movement,  The,  in  English 

Poetry  (Symons),  xxiv,  xxvi 
Rome,  343,  469 

Room  with  a  View,  A  (Forster),  385 
Rosa  Amoroso  (Egerton),  325,   483 
Rosanne  (Syrett),  450 
Rose  of  Joy,  A  (Findlater),  354 
Rose  of  Life,  The  (Braddon),  453 
Rosmersholm  (Ibsen),  254 
Rossetti,   Christina,  xxiii,  15,    141, 

451 
Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  "  Dante's 

Dream,"  xiv  ;  Hall  Caine  and,  342 
Rothenstein,  Will,  xviii 
Round  the  Corner  (Carman),  381,  383 
Rousseau,  Influence  of,  275 
Rout  of  the  Amazons,  The  (Moore), 

122 

Royal  Road,  The  (Ollivant),  409 
Royal   Runaway,    The    (Housman), 

326 

Rue  (Housman),  105 
Rulers  of  Kings  (Atherton),  478 
Rupert  of  Hentzau  (Hope),  4C4 


INDEX 


499 


Ruskin,   John,   xi ;    judgments  on 

art,    xv,    xvi,    xvii ;     on    John 

Strange  Winter,  448 
Russell,  Geo.  W.  ("  A.  E."),  xxix  ; 

as  poet,  158,  162,  163,  173-176  ; 

as  dramatist,  199  ;  George  Moore 

and,  286 
Rutherford,      Mark      (Wm.     Hale 

White),  as  novelist,  314-315 
Rutherford  and  Son  (Sowerby),  261 

Sabrina  Warham  (Housman),  325 
Sackville,  Lady  Margaret,  as  poet, 

149-151 

Sacred  and  Profane  Love  (Austin),  8 
Sailing  of  the  Longships,  The  (New- 
bolt),  114 

St.  Ives  (Stevenson),  331 
Saints  and  Sinners  (Jones),  232,  233 
Saintsbury,  Prof.  George,  88,  223 
Saisiaz,  La  (Browning),  xii 
"  Saki  "  (Hector  Munro),  as  essay- 
ist and  novelist,  413 
Sale  of  Saint  Thomas  (Abercrom- 

bie),  101 

Salt-water  Ballads  (Masefield),  97 
Salve  (Moore),  286 
Sant'  Ilario  (Crawford),  469 
Saracinesca  (Crawford),  469 
Satan  Absolved  (Blunt),  14,  15 
Savonarola  (Austin),  6 
Savoy,  The,  xiii,  xviii,  xix,  xx,  323 
Scaramouch  in  Naxos   (Davidson), 

26 

Scarlet  Letter,  The  (Hawthorne),  456 
School  (Robertson),  226 
School  for  Saints,  The  (Hobbes),  443 
Schoolmistress,  The  (Pinero),  229 
Schreiner,   Olive  (Mrs.  S.  C.  Cron- 

wright),  as  novelist,  427-429 
Scotland,  158 
Scots  Observer,  xxvii 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,  275 
Scribe,  A.  E.,  234 
Season,  The  (Austin),  6 
Seats  of  the  Mighty,  The  (Parker), 

336 
Second      Mrs.       Tanqueray,       The 

(Pinero),  230,  234 
Second   Thoughts,    The,   of  an  Idle 

Fellow  (Jerome),  345 
Secret  Rose  (Yeats),  166 
Secret  Woman,  The  (Phillpotts),  376 
Senator  North  (Atherton),  478 
Sentimental       Studies        (Crackan- 

thorpe),  317 

Sentimental  Tommy  (Barrie),  350 
Septimus   Locke),  406,  407 


Seth's  Brother's  Wife  (Frederic),  471 
Seven  Golden  Odes  of  Pagan  Arabia 

(Blunt),  15 

Seven  Seas,  The  (Kipling),  37,  38,  39 
Seven  Short  Plays  (Gregory),  204 
Seven    Sleepers    of    Ephesus,     The 

(Coleridge),    147,    144 
Sex    Questions,    Women    novelists 

and,  433,  434 

Shadow  of  a  Crime,  The  (Caine),  342 
Shadowy  Waters,  The  (Yeats),  164. 

171,  172 
Shakespeare,  G.  Bernard  Shaw  and, 

240-241 

Shamrocks  (Tynan),  190 
Shannon,  Charles,  xviii 
Shapes  of  Clay  (Bierce),  477 
Sharp,    Wm.    (Fiona   Macleod),    as 

poet,  40,  49-50  ;    and  the  Celtic 

spirit,  158  ;  as  novelist,  347-348 
Shaving  of  Shagpat  (Meredith),  415 
Shaw,  George  Bernard,  his  dramatic 

characters,  211  ;    his  ideas,  238  ; 

his  novels,  239  ;   as  a  critic,  239  ; 

as  dramatist,  239-247,  250,  327  ; 

collaborates  with  William  Archer, 

242  ;    prefaces  to  plays,  247  ;    as 

novelist,  326-327 
She  (Haggard),  332 
Sheehan,  Canon  P.  A.,  as  novelist, 

414-415 

Shelley's  Prometheus  Unbound  com- 
pared with  Hardy's  The  Dynasts, 

57  ;    The  Cenci,  173,  224 
Shepherd's  Life,  A  (Hudson),  330 
Ship  of  Stars,  The  (Quiller-Couch), 

331 
Ships  that  Pass  in  the  Night  (Harra- 

den),  438 

Shoes  of  Fortune,  The  (Munro),  349 
Shorter,    Dora    Sigerson,    as    poet, 

191-192 

Shorter  Poems  (Bridges),  9 
Shoulders  of  Atlas,   The  (Wilkins), 

472 
Showing-up  of  Blanco  Posnet,  The 

(Shaw),  245 
Shropshire,  69 
Shropshire  Lad,  A  (Housman),  67, 

68 
Sidgwick,  Mrs.  Alfred,  as  novelist, 

449 
Sidgwick,  Ethel,  as  novelist,  450- 

451 
Sigerson,  Dora.     See  Shorter,  Dora 

S. 

Sigerson,  Dr.  George,  181 
Si  ht  and  Song  (Field),  146 


500 


INDEX 


Sign  of  Four,  The  (Doyle),  334 
Silas  Marner  (Eliot),  281 
Silberrad,  Una  L.,  as  novelist,  450 
Silhouettes  (Symons),  21,  322 
Silver  Box,  The  (Galsworthy),  255, 

257 

Silver  King,  The  (Jones),  232 
Simla,  302 
Simon  Rideout,  Quaker  (Silberrad), 

450 

Simon  the  Jester  (Locke),  407 
Sin  of  David,  The  (Phillips),  79,  80, 

86 

Sin-eater,  The  (Sharp),  347 
Sinclair,  May,  as  novelist,  436-437 
Sinclair,  Upton,  457  :    as  novelist, 

475 

Sinister  Street  (Mackenzie),  387 
Sinner's  Comedy,  The  (Hobbes),  442 
Sir  Charles  Orandison  (Richardson), 

425 

Sir  George  Tressady  (Ward),  424 
Sir  George's  Objection  (Clifford),  449 
Sir  Nigel  (Doyle),  334 
Sister  Songs  (Thompson),  51 
Sister  Teresa  (Moore),  200,  284,  289, 

290,  293 

Skipper's  Wooing,  The  (Jacobs),  346 
Slave  of  the  Lamp,  The  (Merriman), 

337 

Sleeping  Waters  (Trevena),  380 
Sligo,  Co.,  166 
Smith  (Maugham),  268 
Smollett,  Tobias,  G.,  275 
Snob  Papers  (Thackeray),  410 
Society  (Robertson),  226 
Soldiers  Three  (Kipling),  301 
Solitary  Summer,  A  (Arnim),  445 
Some     Emotions     and     a     Moral 

(Hobbes),  442 
Some  Experiences  of  an  Irish  R.M. 

(Somerville  and  Ross),  452 
Some  Notes  of  a  Struggling  Genius 

(Street),  410 

Somehow  Good  (Do  Morgan),  386 
Somerville,  Edith  O.  E.,  and  Martin 

Ross  (Violet  Martin),  as  novelists, 

452 

Son  of  Hagar,  A  (Caine),  342 
Song    in    September    (Gale),     111, 

112 

Song  of  Renny,  The  (Hewlett),  399 
Song  of  the  Sword,  The  (Henley),  30 
Songs    and   Meditations    (Hewlett), 

87,  88 

Songs  in  Wiltshire  (Williams),  128 
Songs  of  a  Devotee  (Koohler),  181 
Songs  of  Aphrodite  (Sackville),  150 


j  Songs  of  Childhood  (de  la  Mare),  133 

Songs  of  Dreams  (Clifford),  151 
!  Songs  of  Joy  (Davies),  130 
Songs  of  Memory  and  Hope  (New- 
bolt),  114,  115 
Songs     of    the     Glens     of    Antrim 

(O'Neill),  185 

Songs  of  the  Morning  (Hopper),  189 
Sons   of  the  Morning    (Phillpotts), 

376 

Sons  of  the  Sword  (Woods),  447 
Sordello  (Browning),  119 
Sorrowful     Princess,     The     (Gore- 
Booth),  187 

Sospiri  di  Roma  (Sharp),  49 
Soul's  Destroyer,  The  (Davies),  129 
South  Seas,  The,  135 
Sowerby,  Miss  Githa,  as  dramatist, 

261-262 

Sowers,  The  (Merriman),  337 
Sowing  the  Wind  (Grundy),  235 
Spain,  328 

Spanish  Gold  (Birmingham),  414 
Spencerian  Philosophy,  xii 
Sphinx,  The  (Wilde),  4,  5 
Spikenard  (Housman),  105,  326 
Spirit  in  Prison,  A  (Hichens),  395, 

396,  397,  398 

Spiritual  Adventures  (Symons),  322 
Splendid  Spur,  The  (Quiller-Couch), 

331 

Spreading  the  News  (Gregory),  204 
Squire,  J.  Collings,  parodies  of  John 

Masefield,  98 

Squire,  The  (Pinero),  230 
Stalky  and  Co.  (Kipling),  306,  307 
Stars  of  the  Desert  (Hope),  143 
Steevens,  Geo.  W.,  xxvii 
Stella  Maris  (Locke),  407 
Stephens,  James,  as  poet,  179-180  ; 

as  novelist,  415—416 
Sterne,  Laurence,  275 
Stevenson,  Robt.  Louis,  as  writer, 
346  ;    and  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie  com- 
pared, 352  ;    as  novelist,  356 
Stickit  Minister,  The  (Crockett),  353 
Stolen  Bacillus,  The  (Wells),  360 
Stonefolds,  The  (Gibson),  96 
Stooping  Lady,  The  (Hewlett),  399, 

401 
Stories  of  Red  Hanrahan   (Yeats), 

166 
Story  of  an  African  Farm  (Schrei- 

ner),  427,  428 

Story  of  Bessie  Costrell  (Ward),  426 
Story  of  Clarice,  The  (Tynan),  451 
Story  of  Patty,  The  (Wiggin),  479 
Strathmore  (Ouida),  453 


INDEX 


501 


Street,     George     S.,     as     essayist 
satirist,  and  novelist,  410-411  ; 
examiner  of  plays,  410 
Street  of  To-day,    The   (Masefield), 

394 

Strife  (Galsworthy),  255,  257 
Strike  at  Arlingford,   The  (Moore), 

201 
Studies  in  Prose  and  Verse  (Symons), 

xxiv,  xxv 

Studies  in  Seven  Arts  (Symons),  xiv 
Studies  in  Two  Literatures  (Symons) 

xxii,  xxiv 

Study  in  Scarlet,  A  (Doyle),  334 
Study  in  Temptations,  A  (Hobbes), 

442 
Study    of    Celtic    Literature,    The 

(Arnold),   157 
Success  (Graham),  329 
Succession  (Sidgwick),  450 
Suicide  Club  (Stevenson),  350 
Summer  Night,  A  (Watson),  148 
Sussex,  31,   124 

Sutro,  Alfred,  as  dramatist,  267 
Sweet  Lavender  (Pinero),  229 
Sweetheart  Gwen  (Tirebuck),  340 
Swinburne,  Algernon  C.,  xiv,  4,  and 

historic  drama,  225 
Sylvia  (Sinclair),  475 
Symbolism  in  literature,  xxiii 
Symbolist  Movement,  The,  in  Litera- 
ture (Symons),  xxiii,  xxiv 
Symons,  Arthur,  and  art,  xvii,  and 
The  Yellow  Book,  xvii,  xix,  xx  ; 
and    The    Savoy,    xx,    xxii  ;     as 
critic,  xxii,  xxvi ;  as  poet,  20-24 ; 
on     Henley's    poems,     31  ;      on 
Hubert  Crackanthorpe,  316  ;    as 
story  writer,  322-323 
Symphonies  (Egerton),  432 
Synge,    John    M.,    xxix,    424  ;     as 
dramatist,     160,     193,    206-216  ; 
W.  B.  Yeats  and,   164,  167  ;    as 
poet,    178 ;     his    life,    206 ;     as 
dramatist,    206-216  ;     the  idiom 
of  his  characters,  213  ;    his  per- 
sonality, 216 
Syrett,  Netta,  as  novelist,  449-450 

Tables  of  the  Law,  The  (Yeats),  166 

Taken  from  the  Enemy  (Newbolt), 
402 

Tale  of  a  Town,  A  (Martyn),  199, 
200 

Tales  from  the  Welsh  Hills  (Tire- 
buck),  340 

Tales  of  Mean  Streets  (Morrison), 
387 


Tales    of    Soldiers    and    Civilians 

(Bierce),  477 
Tales  of  Space  and  Time  (Wells), 

360 

Tales  of  Unrest  (Conrad),  388 
Tales  that  are  Told  (Findlater),  354 
Taming  of  John  Blunt,   The  (Olli- 

vant),  409 

Temporal  Power  (Corelli),  454 
Tennessee,  472,  475 
Tennyson,    Alfred,   Lord,    and   the 

Victorian  Age,  xi  ;    as  poet,  5  ; 

and  the  Arthurian  legends,  113  ; 

as  dramatist,  224 
Testament    of    a     Vivesector,     The 

(Davidson),  27,  28 
Testament  of  John  Davidson,   The, 

27,  28 
Teutonic  influence,  xix  ;   literature, 

159  ;  race,  184 
Thackeray,  Wm.  M.,  xi,  276 
Theatrocrat,  The  (Davidson),  29 
Their  Wedding  Journey  (Howells), 

467 
Theseus,  Medea  and  Lyrics  (Moore), 

122 
They  that  Walk  in  Darkness  (Zang- 

will),  338 
Thompson,    Francis,    as   poet,    40, 

61-53 
Three    Brothers,    The    (Phillpotts), 

376 

Three  Men  in  a  Boat  (Jerome),  345 
Three      Men      on      the      Bummell 

(Jerome),  345 
'  Three  Musicians,  The '  (Beardsley ), 

xxi 
Three   Plays  for  Puritans   (Shaw), 

244 

Three     Resurrections,     The    (Gore- 
Booth),  188 

Thurston,  E.  Temple,  387 
Thyrza  (Gissing),  296 
Time   Machine,    The    (Wells),    359, 

360 

Time's  Laughing-Stocks  (Hardy),  56 
Timothy's  Quest  (Wiggin),  479 
Tinker's  Wedding,  The  (Synge),  207 

209 

Tinted  Venus,  The  (Anstey),  345 
Tirebuck,  William  E.,  as  novelist, 

339-340 
To  Leda  and  Other  Odes  (Moore), 

122 

To  London  Town  (Morrison),  387 
Together  (Herrick),  476 
Told  in  the  Dog  Watches  (Bullen), 

394 


502 


INDEX 


Tolstoy,  Count,  276,  426 
Tom  Jones  (Fielding),  278 
Tommy  and  Grizel  (Barrie),  350 
Tono-Bungay  (Wells),  361,  363,  364 
Tower  of  Babel,  The  (Austin),  6 
Tower  of  Ivory,  The  ( Atherton),  478 
Town  Traveller,  The  (Gissing),  298 
Traffics  and  Discoveries   (Kipling), 

306 

Tragedy  of  Nan,  The  (Masefield),  262 
Tragedy  of  Pompey  the  Great,  The 

(Masefield),  262 
Tragic  Mary,  The  (Field),  146 
Tragic  Muse,  The  (James),  459 
Traill,  H.  D.,  on  William  Sharp's 

work,  50 
Travels  in  Arabia  Deserta  (Doughty) 

90 

Treasure  Island  (Stevenson),  330 
Trelawny  of  the  Wells  (Pinero),  229 
Trench,  Herbert,  as  poet,  69-73 
Trevena,  John  (Ernest  G.  Henham), 

as  novelist,  374,  377,  378-381 
Trials  of  the  Bantocks,  The  (Street), 

410,  411 

Tristram  and  Iseult,  77 
Tristram  of  Lyonesse  (Swinburne), 

113 

Tristram  Shandy  (Sterne),  383 
Triumph  of  Failure,  The  (Sheehan), 

415 

Triumph    of    Mceve,     The    (Gore- 
Booth),  187 
Trooper  Peter  Halket  of  Mashona- 

land  (Schreiner),  428 
Troth,  The  (Mayne),  219 
Troubadour,  The,  and  Other  Poems 

(Tynan),  191 

Troy  Town  (Quiller-Couch),  331 
True  Tilda  (Quiller-Couch),  331 
Trust  the  People  (Houghton),  249, 

260 
Twelve  Stories  and  a  Dream  (Wells), 

360 

Twisting  of  the  Rope  (Hyde),  196 
'Twixt    God    and    Mammon    (Tire- 
buck),  340 

'Twixt  Land  and  Sea  (Conrad),  388 
Two  Mr.  Wetherbys,  The  (Hankin), 

251 

Two  Virtues,  The  (Sutro),  267 
Twymans,  The  (Newbolt),  402 
Tynan,  Katharine  (Mrs.  Hinkson), 

as  poet,    190-191  ;     as  novelist, 

451-452 

Typhoon  (Conrad),  388 
Tyranny  of  Tears,  The  (Chambers), 

235 


Ulster  Literary  Theatre,  220 
Ulysses  (Phillips),  78,  79,  86 
Ulysses  (Tennyson),  75 
Unbearable  Bassington,  The  (Munro), 

413 

Unclassed,  The  (Gissing),  296 
Under    Quicken    Boughs    (Hopper), 

189 
Under    the    Cedars    and    the    Stars 

(Sheehan),  415 

Under  the  Deodars  (Kipling),  302 
'  Under  the  Hill '  (Beardsley),  xxi 
Under  Two  Flags  (Ouida),  453 
Under  Western  Eyes  (Conrad),  389 
Underneath  the  Bough  (Field),  145, 

146 

Unseen  Kings  (Gore-Booth),  187 
Unsocial  Socialist,  An  (Shaw),  326 
Unfilled  Field,  The  (Moore),  201, 284, 

290 
Urlyn  the  Harper  (Gibson),  95 

Vagabonds,  The  (Woods),  447 
Vale  (Moore),  286 
Veranilda  (Gissing),  295 
Verlaine,  Paul,  22,  24 
Verona's  Father  (Murray),  341 
Verses  (Belloc),  124 
—  (Dowson),  47 
Verses  and  Parodies  (Quiller- 
Couch),  112 

Verses  and  Sonnets  (Belloc),  123 
Vespertilia  (Marriott  Watson),  148 
Vicar    of     Wakefield    (Goldsmith), 

233 

Vice  Versd  (Anstey),  344 
Victorian  Age,  The  end  of  the,  xi 

seqq. 

Vigil  of  Venus  (Quiller-Couch),  113 
Vignettes   (Crackanthorpe),   318 
Villa  Rubein  (Galsworthy),  369 
Village  on  the  Cliff,  The  (Ritchie), 

447 

Village  Tragedy,  A  (Woods),  447 
Villette  (Bronte),  274 
Villiers  de  1'Isle  Adam,  Drama  of, 

xxviii 
Vine-Dresser,  The,  and  Other  Poems 

(Moore),  122 

Vineyard,  The  (Hobbes),  443 
Virginia,  472,  473 
Virginia  (Glasgow),  473 
Virginian,  The  (Wister),  473 
Vision  of  Sin  (Tennyson),  69 
Vistas  (Sharp),  347 
Votes  for  Women  (Robins),  435 
Voysey  Inheritance,    The,   (Barker), 

249 


INDEX 


503 


Wages  of  Sin,  The  (Malet),  439,  440, 

441 

Wales,  158,  340 

Walker,  Prof.  Hugh,  on  Mangan,  161 
Walls  of  Jericho,  The  (Sutro),  267 
Walpole,  Hugh,  387 
Wanderings  of  Oisin,  The,  164,  166, 

169,  170,  202 

War  God,  The  (Zangwill),  338 
War  of  the  Worlds,  The  (Wells),  361 
Ward,    Mrs.    Humphry,    276 ;     as 

novelist,   419—427 ;    influence  of 

her    girlhood,    421  ;     beginnings 

as  authoress,  421  ;    view  of  life, 

426 

Ward,  Thomas  Humphry,   421 
Waste  (Barker),  249 
Watson,  John  M.  ("  lanMaclaren"), 

as  novelist,  353 
Watson,  Mrs.  Rosamund  Marriott, 

xviii  ;  as  poet,  148-149 
Watson,  Sir  William,  6  ;    as  poet, 

40-45  ;   his  position,  45 
Watts-Dunton,    Walter    Theodore, 

4;     as   poet   and   critic,    11-12; 

as  novelist,  313 
Waugh,  Arthur,  xix 
Way  of  All  Flesh,  The  (Butler),  310, 

311,  312,  381 
Way  of  Ambition,   The   (Hichens), 

397 

Weaker  Sex,  The  (Pinero),  229 
Weavers,  The  (Parker),  336 
Web  of  Life,  The  (Gibson),  95 
Webb,  Sidney,  239,  246 
Weber,  Die  (Hauptmann),  194 
Wedding  of  the  Lady  of  Lovel,  The 

(Silberrad),  450 
Wee  Willie  Winkie  (Kipling),  302, 

303 

Weekes,  Charles,  181 
Weir    of    Hermiston     (Stevenson), 

352,  356 
Well  of  the  Saints,  The  (Synge),  158, 

208,  209,  214,  215,  216 
Wells,  H.  G.,  on  novels  as  works  of 

art,  276  ;    as  novelist,  357-364  ; 

scientific     romances,     358 ;      his 

career,   358-359 ;    his  sociology, 

359,  362,  363 
Wesley,  Hetty,  331 
Wessex,  Thomas  Hardy  and,  60,  66 
Wessex  Poems  (Hardy),  56,  66 
West  Country  fiction,  374 
West  Kerry  (Synge),  207 
Westcotes,  The  (Quiller- Couch),  331 
Western    Avernus,    The    (Roberts), 

344 


Whaleman's  Wife,  A  (Bullen),  394 
Wharton,  Edith,  as  novelist,  479- 

480 
What  Every  Woman  Knows  (Barrie), 

266 
What  Maisie  Knew  (James),   389, 

459,  462,  466 

Wheels  of  Chance,  The  (Wells),  361 
When  a  Man's  Single  (Barrie),  350 
When  Ghost  Meus  Ghost  (De  Mor- 
gan), 386 

When  the  Sleeper  Wakes  (WTells),  361 
When    Valmond    Came    to    Pontiac 

(Parker),  335,  336 
When  William  Came  (Saki),  413 
Where  Angels  Fear  to  Tread  (Fors- 

ter),  384 
Where  are  you  going  to  .  . .  ?  (Robins), 

435 

Where  Love  Is  (Locke),  405 
Where  there  is  Nothing  (Yeats),  197, 

198 

Whirlpool,  The  (Gissing),  298 
Whirlwind,    The    (Phillpotts),    376, 

377 

Whistler,      James     M'Neill,     xiv ; 
action  against  Ruskin,  xv  ;   and 
W.  E.  Henley,  xxvii 
White  Cockade,  The  (Gregory),  204 
White  Company,  The  (Doyle),  334 
White  Fang  (London),  478 
White  Woman,  The  (Tirebuck),  340 
White-washing  Julia  (Jones),  234 
Whitman,  Walt,  455 
j   Widdicombe  (Willcocks),   438 
I   Widecombe  Fair  (Phillpotts),  376 
Widow,     The,     in     the     Bye-street 

(Masefield),  98,  99 
Widowers'  Houses  (Shaw),  242,  243 
Wiggin,  Kate  Douglas  (Mrs.  G.  C. 

Riggs),  as  novelist,  479 
Wild  Earth  (Colum),  179 
Wild  Honey  (Field),  146 
Wild  Justice  (Woods),  17,  447 
Wild  Knight,  The,  and  Other  Poems 

(Chesterton),  125 

Wilde,  Oscar,  aestheticism,  xiii,  xv, 
xviii ;  characteristics,  xv ;  theory 
of  the  nature  of  art,  xvi,  xvii ;  as 
poet,  5  ;    as  dramatist,  223,  225, 
226-228  ;   as  novelist,  282-284 
Wilkins,  Mary  E.  (Mrs.  C.  M.  Free- 
man), as  novelist,  457,  472 
Wilkins,  W.  H.,  316 
Will  Warburton  (Gissing),  295 
Willcocks,  Miss  M.  P.,  as  novelist, 

436,  437-438 
William  Rufus  (Field).  146 


504 


INDEX 


Williams,  Alfred,  his  career,   127  ; 

as  poet,  127-129 
Wiltshire,  128 

Wiltshire  Village,  A  (Williams),  128 
Wind  Among  the  Reeds,  The  (Yeats), 

164,  165,  166,  168,  169,  171,  173 
Wind,     The,    and    the     Whirlwind 

(Blunt),  14 
Window  in  Thrums,  A  (Barrie),  350, 

351,  352 

Wine  Press,  The  (Noyea),  121 
Wingless    Victory,   The  (Willcocks), 

438 
Wings  of  the  Dove,  The  (James),  462, 

464 
Winter,  John  Strange  (Mrs.  H.  E.  V. 

Stannard),  as  novelist,  448 
Wintering  Hay  (Trevena),  380 
Wisdom  of  Folly,  The  (Fowler),  446 
Wisdom  of  the  Wise,  The  (Hobbes), 

443 
Wise,      The,     and     the      Wayward 

(Street),  410,  411 
Wister,  Owen,  as  novelist,  473 
With  Christ  at  Sea  (Bullen),  394 
Wolf,  The  (Norris),  474 
Woman  Alone,  A  (Clifford),  449 
Woman     of     No     Importance,     A 

(Wilde),  227 
Woman     Thou     Gavest     Me,     The 

(Caine),  343 
Woman  Who  Did,  The  (Allen),  337, 

429 
Woman  With  the  Fan,  The  (Hichens) 

396 

Women  novelists,   417  seqq.;    suc- 
cessful, 452 
Women  writers,  in  verse,  15  ;    and 

pseudonyms,    141  ;     increase   in, 

141 

Women's  Tragedies  (Lowry),  322 
Wonderful  Visit,  The  (Wells),  360 
Woods,  Margaret  Louisa,  as  poet, 

17-18,  142  ;    as  novelist,  447 


Wordsworth,  Sir  Wm.  Watson  and, 

compared,   42 ;    as  nature   poet, 

127 
Wordsworth's  Grave   (Watson),   40, 

41,  42 

Workers  in  the  Dawn  (Gissing),  296 
Workhouse    Ward,    The    (Gregory), 

205 

World  Set  Free,  The  (Wells),  359 
Wormwood  (Corelli),  454 
Wreckage  (Crackanthorpe),  316,  317 

318 
Wreckers  and   Methodists    (Lowry), 

322 

Yeats,  Jack  B.,  167 

Yeats,  William  B.,  xix ;  contri- 
butes to  The  Yellow  Book,  xviii ; 
to  The  Savoy,  xx ;  as  poet, 
158,  161,  163-174  ;  as  dramatic 
writer,  163,  171,  173,  197-198, 
202  ;  his  career,  165  ;  as  writer 
of  prose  fiction,  165  ;  influence 
of  Maeterlinck,  166 ;  influence 
of  Blake,  167 ;  influence  of 
Lady  Gregory,  198  ;  and  J.  M. 
Synge,  206 

Yellow  Aster,  A  (Iota),  433 

Yellow  Book,  The,  xiii,  xviii,  xix, 
xx,  49  ;  contributors,  104,  108, 
284,  315,  321,  323,  432 

Yonge,  Charlotte  M.,  276 

You  Never  Can  Tell  (Shaw),  243, 
244 

Young,  Ella,  188 

Younger  Generation,  The  (Hough- 
ton),  260 

Youth  (Conrad),  388,  392 

Zangwill,  Israel,  as  novelist,  338- 

339 
Zola,    Emile,    Arthur    Symons   on, 

xxiii ;  and  George  Moore,  284,  285 
Zuleika  Dobson  (Beerbohm),  324 


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